Podcast appearances and mentions of laura kalbag

Stately is a web-based drag and drop editor for collaboratively developing code, diagrams, and documentation. Laura Kalbag is the Developer Advocate at Stately and she joins the show today to talk about Stately, state machines, building good documentation, and more. Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He The post Stately with Laura Kalbag appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Stately is a web-based drag and drop editor for collaboratively developing code, diagrams, and documentation. Laura Kalbag is the Developer Advocate at Stately and she joins the show today to talk about Stately, state machines, building good documentation, and more. Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He The post Stately with Laura Kalbag appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Amal, Nick & special guest Laura Kalbeg geek out over the remarkable growth and evolution of the XState project and its team in recent years. Laura also tells everyone about Stately.ai, a SaaS platform that uses AI to create seamless state management solutions compatible with various tools like XState, Redux & zustand.

Amal, Nick & special guest Laura Kalbeg geek out over the remarkable growth and evolution of the XState project and its team in recent years. Laura also tells everyone about Stately.ai, a SaaS platform that uses AI to create seamless state management solutions compatible with various tools like XState, Redux & zustand.

Aral Balkan is co-founder of Small Technology Foundation, which is promoting "everyday tools for everyday people designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits." Aral and his Small Technology co-founder Laura Kalbag have been advocating for regulation of surveillance capitalism, investment in ethical alternatives, and carrying out research and development on ethical alternatives. Aral joins host Steve Boland to discuss decentralized social communication tools for nonprofit organizations (and everyone else!). Aral talks about federated communications tools (the Fediverse) like Mastodon (microblogging like Twitter but without corporate ownership), PixelFed (more image focused like Instagram) and many other ideas. Aral discusses the problematic relationship between charities seeking to have real engagement with audiences and how corporate platforms interfere at best, or undermine those efforts. Federate tools for communication and the small web in general puts more control in the hands of users and removes algorithms from the communications outreach loop for charities. A program note: There was a microphone selection problem during this recording which has Steve sounding a bit muffled and far away. Aral sounds great, so please bear with the audio issue to get all the great information from Aral! More info at NextInNonprofits.com/podcast!

Web3 is a term that's getting a lot of attention, along with associated concepts such as blockchain, crypto, NFTs. There are a lot of concepts and phrases to understand, some of them quite technical, before we can get to the question of what benefits they can deliver. Laura Kalbag joins us to help us gain... The post #290 Web3 with Laura Kalbag appeared first on UX Podcast.

Laura Kalbag calls on businesses using people's data for profit to examine the ethics of that model, and talks practical inclusive design and digital accessibility. Highlights include: ⭐ How are accessibility and inclusive design different? ⭐ What does the inaccessible state of the web say about technologists? ⭐ What's wrong with companies profiting from our behavioural data? ⭐ Why have you gone to great lengths to live up to your values? ⭐ What can we do to help our organisations to make more ethical decisions? ====== Who is Laura Kalbag? Laura is a designer and developer, as well as the Co-Founder of the Small Technology Foundation, a two-person and one-husky, not-for-profit, that strives for a more ethical, more private, and more just technology industry. From 2016 until December 2021, the Small Technology Foundation made and supported Better, a digital privacy tool for Safari - across Apple's operating systems. Laura is also a passionate proponent for creating a web that is inclusive and accessible. In 2017 she published her first book, “Accessibility for Everyone”, through A Book Apart. The book is a guide to the accessibility landscape. Helping people to understand disability and impairment challenges; get a handle on important laws and guidelines; and to learn how to plan for, evaluate, and test accessible design. ====== Find Laura here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurakalbag/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/LauraKalbag Website: https://laurakalbag.com/ Small Technology Foundation: Website: https://small-tech.org/ Email: hello@small-tech.org ====== Liked what you heard and want to hear more? Subscribe and support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). Follow us on our other social channels for more great Brave UX content! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheSpaceInBetween/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/  ====== Hosted by Brendan Jarvis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/ Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis/

A few months ago we heard from Amber Hinds about the importance of accessibility and how her WordPress plugin can help you create more accessible content. She also said that you need a human being to catch most accessibility issues – that’s where Bet Hannon comes in. Bet tells us all about what to look for when auditing your website, and how to execute a sampling audit. We also talk about a TON of tools. In Build Something More, listeners get a pre-and post-show. The pre-show is all about beer. The post-show is about database queries. (more…) View on separate page Transcript Joe Casabona: Real quick before we get started, I want to tell you about the Build Something Weekly newsletter. It is weekly, it is free, and you will get tips, tricks, and tools delivered directly to your mailbox. I will recap the current week’s episode and all of the takeaways, I’ll give you a top story, content I wrote, and then some recommendations that I’ve been using that I think you should check out. So it is free, it is a weekly, it’s over at howibuilt.it/subscribe. Go ahead and sign up over at howibuilt.it/subscribe. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Episode 219 of How I Built It, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips for small business owners. That’s a relatively new tagline I’m trying. It used to be “the podcast that asks, ‘how did you build that?'” But we’re expanding beyond that and I’m really excited about that. First, before we get into it, I want to thank our sponsors: TextExpander, Restrict Content Pro, and The Events Calendar. You’ll be hearing about them later in the show. But first, I want to bring on Bet Hannon. Bet Hannon is the CEO of Bet Hannon Business Websites. We are going to be talking about their website accessibility sampling audit. In an earlier episode, I spoke to Amber Hinds about accessibility in general, their tool, the Accessibility Checker. Now we’re going to learn how an agency actually goes about doing an audit and helping their clients not get sued and have a more accessible website. So Bet, how are you today? Bet Hannon: I’m great. Glad to be here. Joe Casabona: Thanks for coming on the show. For those of you who are not Build Something Club members, bet and I had a fantastic pre-show conversation about craft beer. So if you are interested in that, you should become a Build Something Club member over at buildsomething.club. But for now, Bet, before we get into the nitty-gritty, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Bet Hannon: Great. So I run an agency that’s focused on WordPress. I got involved with WordPress in about 2008 after I had worked for 15 or so years in nonprofit management and doing some techie geeky things for the organizations that I served. But my position got downsized in that financial crisis and kind of stumbled into starting to do a little freelancing and then develop that into an agency. And have been loving it. I love problem-solving for people. Every project is like a little puzzle to solve. Joe Casabona: Yes, absolutely. That is what I also enjoyed about. When I was doing the full-time freelance website making thing, that was always my favorite part. I wrote a plugin recently, the first one in a while and I was like, “Man, I miss this.” So I’ll have to make it a habit of coding regularly. You lose it too. I guess it’s kind of like riding a bike. But men, things change. Bet Hannon: I know. I’m missing more. I’m doing more. I’m doing less and less of that myself, you know, as I’m running the agency. But it is nice to get in. What I miss is diving in and doing Gravity Forms customization. Joe Casabona: Nice, nice. Well, not nice that you miss it, but nice that you would do it. I always liked customizing Gravity Forms. So you got into WordPress in 2008. So this is your second recession, we’ll say. As we record this, there’s still a global pandemic. Bet Hannon: We actually have been doing okay. I was kind of worried for a bit. You know, a lot of folks really just figuring out they need websites or they need to revamp their websites, or they need to repurpose their websites. So we’ve been doing okay. Joe Casabona: That’s great. That’s interesting. I had a conversation with Brad Morrison back in May 2020 about that very thing. Like we were both kind of making websites in 2008, 2009. And I feel like whenever there is a recession, people realize they need to pivot or improve their online presence. I mean, especially true with this current one because…yeah. Bet Hannon: Right, right. Figuring out how to get information out there about when they’re going to be open or how they’re going to do curbside pickup or all of that stuff. I am kind of notoriously bad for giving unsolicited feedback about websites. So when I go to the local restaurant and I’ve looked up their thing, and I go, “Hey, your colors here are not accessible and this is terrible on mobile.” Joe Casabona: Man, I would do the same thing, where I’m like, “This should really be like that.” However, the PDF doesn’t download or whatever. Your website not…” Bet Hannon: Last week I went to the dentist. I paid the dentist bill from a couple months ago, but there’s no way to pay it online. I had to call and give them and do it over the phone. So when I went in, I said, “You should really not be taking those numbers over the phone. It’s easy to make a payment form. Call me.” Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly. “Let me know.” I’m always incensed when you can’t pay for something online or whatever. So you have a WordPress agency now. Would you say that your main focus is accessibility or it’s just something you bake into every website? Bet Hannon: Well, it’s something we bake into every website. We got started with accessibility almost four years ago now. We had a client where we were doing administrative maintenance on their site and they are… they’re still our client. They were our a big agricultural Water District in California. And because of the way they’re connected to the state of California, they became aware that they were going to have some accessibility requirements. And they asked about what needed to happen. We said, “Oh, we could refer you to somebody.” And they said, “Well, we want to work with you. Let’s all learn this together.” Joe Casabona: Wow. Bet Hannon: So we dived in, and our entire team got trained and learned a lot about accessibility and worked through a lot of that with the client and just really got hooked. When you start diving into what makes the site accessible, but also the power of making the website available to more people and usable by more people and seeing how it really can impact people’s lives, whether they have a permanent disability or a temporary disability even, you know, to be able to use the sites. And so we just really got excited about that. Some of the best advice I got as an agency owner was never ever put accessibility in a proposal as something to be refused. That you should never put yourself in a position of allowing the client to throw people with disabilities under the bus in terms of bringing down the cost. That for me it’s staking our reputation as an agency on… everything we do has accessibility baked in. And I truly believe that accessibility is going to be what mobile responsive used to be five or 10 years ago. In another five to 10 years, everybody will be doing accessible websites and it’ll just be what every self-respecting developer does. So we’re just kind of on the early curve for that. Joe Casabona: I love that. When you said that it reminded me a lot of responsive web design. Because that was something that I felt I got in on early. I saw Ethan Marcotte talk about it super early. I put it in my proposal as like, “Do you want a responsive website?” And then I was like, “Why am I even asking? It’s just going to be part of it. It’ll be part of the cost. If they want to buy a cheap website from someone else, they can.” Bet Hannon: Yeah. And quite frankly, more often than not, when I talk to clients, and I say, “Look, this is part of what we do. We bake it into everyone. There are some legal requirements that you may or may not have. You need to do this,” and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, thanks. I hadn’t even thought about that yet.” So they’re usually grateful for having it or the topic being brought up. Joe Casabona: Absolutely. I mean, it’s our job right to advocate on behalf of our clients and inform them, right? When I go to a pizza shop, the pizza shop should expect that I know how to make the perfect pizza. I shouldn’t expect that they know how to make a website. Right? Bet Hannon: Well, it’s kind of what we do as freelancers and agencies. The client comes to us and they may say, “I want this one inch of website.” And we start looking at their… our job is to kind of take a consultative approach and to say, “If you added this on, this would really impact your business in a positive way. You can really grow your business by adding this thing on,” or “tell me about how you do the sales process. Oh, we can help automate that for you.” You know, so that you’re taking more of a consultative approach to helping people understand what they might need that they don’t yet know that they need. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by Restrict Content Pro. If you need a fast, easy way to set up a membership site for yourself or your clients, look no further than the Restrict Content Pro WordPress plugin. Easily create premium content for members using your favorite payment gateway, manage members, send member-only emails, and more. You can create any number of subscription packages, including free levels and free trials. But that’s not all. Their extensive add-ons library allows you to do even more, like drip out content, connect with any number of CRMs and newsletter tools, including ConvertKit and Mailchimp and integrate with other WordPress plugins like bbPress. Since the Build Something Club rolled out earlier this year, you can bet it’s using Restrict Content Pro. And I have used all of the things mentioned here in this ad read. I have created free levels. I’ve created coupons. I use ConvertKit and I’m using it with bbPress for the forums. I’m a big fan of the team, and I know they do fantastic work. The plugin has worked extremely well for me and I was able to get memberships up and running very quickly. Right now, they are offering a rare discount for how I built it listeners only: 20% off your purchase when you use RCPHOWIBUILTIT at checkout. That’s RCPHOWIBUILTIT, all one word. If you want to learn more about Restrict Content Pro and start making money with your own membership site today, head on over to howibuilt.it/rcp. That’s howibuilt.it/rcp. Thanks to Restrict Content Pro for supporting the show. And now let’s get back to it. Joe Casabona: So you mentioned that your team got trained. What was that like? Is there a certification process for accessibility? Bet Hannon: Mm hmm. Joe Casabona: All right. I was going to add a second part of that question, but your face lit up. So go for it. How was it like? Bet Hannon: There are. They’re both. There’s some online journey. There’s a ton of training that you can do out there. So if you’re just starting out and you’re wanting to learn more about website accessibility, some free options for doing that are going to WordPress TV. And there have been a bunch of presentations at various WordCamps on some of the technical pieces for accessibility. I’ll just be the first to confess that I’m not the lead developer at our agency. So some of those kind of technical pieces are not where I would necessarily be helpful to people. But there are tons of presentations from WordCamps to start getting going. There are some LinkedIn Learning pieces. Joe Dolson, who’s an accessibility advocate within WordPress has a great LinkedIn Learning course on Accessibility and WordPress. Very helpful. And then we had our folks do Deque, D-E-Q-U-E, deque.com, they do services around accessibility, but they also have some learning pieces. You can buy basically a membership for a year to do their self-paced online learning pieces. So we have everybody in our group do their base level, which is just awareness about disabilities, and what different accommodations are. So just kind of educating our team about what those are. And then our lead developer has been doing more advanced pieces in preparation for taking a certification exam. So there’s the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. They actually have some certification pieces. Those are several levels, in fact. Those are kind of where our folks are going. So as you may or may not have guessed, one of the ways that you might you would test a website for accessibility might be to use yourself a screen reader. So screen readers are what people who have visual impairments might want to use, and it reads out loud things that are on the web page. We’ve done that, and our developers done that for a long time. But we became aware like, I don’t know, maybe like six months ago, sort of like, well, you can use these tools, but are you using them like a visually impaired user would use them? So I did a little networking and found the consultant and agency, that is the Oregon Federation for the Blind refers people to. So if I experienced blindness and I needed to get training, my state would send me to this guy to learn how to use a screen reader. And we sent her to do training with him, our lead developer. And that was amazing because we had known for sure, but sure enough, people who are blind or visually impaired use screen readers differently than maybe we had anticipated. And so that then helps us be better at testing what we’re doing and how we’re building things out. Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s really interesting. I’ll mention one more resource that I read. Because there’s a chapter in my book on accessibility. But I read “Accessibility for Everyone.” It’s a book by Sarah… Oh, my gosh. Her last name is escaping me right now. I’m very sorry, Sarah. Oh, no, it’s not even Sarah. It’s Laura Kalbag. Laura Kalbag. That’s right. Sorry. But the book is fantastic. I will link that and everything that Bet just mentioned in the show notes over at howibuilt.it/219. Your mention of using a screen reader is very interesting because for my book, there’s a video component where I tried using one in order to show my readers how to use it to test. And honestly, it’s just I had never used one before. So I don’t think it was the most effective demo. But that leads me to ask another question, which is there must be resources in general for testing accessibility with a target audience. Right? So for example, I have transcripts for this podcast. I suspect that there’s a way for those who… Forgive me, I don’t know that I… The proper terminology is escaping me but people who are deaf or have hearing impairments. Is that the right way to put it? Bet Hannon: Mm hmm, hard of hearing. Joe Casabona: Okay. Someone got upset with me for saying hard of hearing Bet Hannon: Well, all kinds of groups, there are a variety of takes on things. Hard of Hearing is what I do see often. Joe Casabona: Okay, cool. That’s what I thought too. Okay, cool. But in any case, I guess, are there resources for you to test accessibility features with those who are most likely to use them? Bet Hannon: Do you mean doing testing with disabled users? Joe Casabona: Yes. Bet Hannon: The actual disabled users? Joe Casabona: Yes, yes. Bet Hannon: Well, people with disabilities often are chronically underemployed, and so if you have a way that you want to do a lot of testing, you could certainly do some networking to find people who could help you with testing. I think you should never ever ask a disabled person to test for you without getting compensated. Joe Casabona: Of course. Bet Hannon: I mean, think that’s just rude. We have several folks that test for us and consult with us when we have questions. Sometimes you’re testing a site and it’s just really hard to get a sense for… you know, if you tagged into this in a certain way, it might get you into a trap that you couldn’t get out of. You know, what are the clues? And so, just kind of having people do some testing for us. So we have a few people that do that for us. Joe Casabona: Got you. Bet Hannon: But resources for finding those people, I don’t… I mean, that’s going to vary quite widely. Joe Casabona: Got you. But there are resources available if you do some networking, like you said, and ask around. Bet Hannon: Yeah. You know, I would ask around. I mean, there’s some state agencies in your state, probably. You could network around about where do they send people when they need training? And then those people who are doing training on those things may often do some consulting like that on the side. Joe Casabona: Awesome. That makes perfect sense. This has already been super informative. Now, you have a website accessibility sampling audit. In a previous episode, I think I mentioned this earlier, with Amber Hinds, we kind of talked about like the WCAG ratings and things like that, which is sort of an automated thing, right? You go to a website, you get a rating. If it’s double, great. If it’s triple, even better. But we still need a person auditing your website, right? Bet Hannon: Yeah, yeah. Right. There are a variety of tools that are out there, automated tools there where you can test your site. And wave.webaim.org is the one that Amber was probably talking about. That’s one of the best known. Lighthouse is another one. It’s a Chrome extension that you can put in in the specter tools and you can look at there. They’re great. Those automated tools are really good and important to us because they can help save you a lot of time. The important thing to remember about them is that they only catch about 30% of the accessibility issues. And you may get some false positives and false negatives. And you’ll always need humankind of… you’ll need to look at things with a human eye. Those testing tools are never going to be enough to say that you’re fully accessible. So, for instance, an AI tool can tell you “yes or no, there’s an alt tag for this image.” Yes is good, No is bad. But if the alt tag is the name of the file, jpg49678, that’s not compliant. So it can give you the false negative that you had all the alt tags are taken care of when they’re not really. So you want to make sure that you’re using those tools as they’re intended, to do some basic screening, but at the same time that you’re really looking at things. Even the tools that Amber and her team have put together are great but they really require you to engage. And that’s the thing with accessibility. There is really no just put a plugin on or just pay to make it go away. You really have to learn what’s accessible and what’s not and implement it regularly. Accessibility has some parts for WordPress, and that’s what we deal with almost always. For WordPress, some parts of accessibility are in the theme. So whether your menu is accessible or not is largely controlled by your theme, for example. Your color contrast of your buttons and your color contrast is set by your theme. But a huge piece of accessibility is your content. So when you’re putting in content, are you making sure that the images have alt tags? Are you making sure that the H tags and the headings are nested without skipping any levels? So a lot of that content piece is stuff that people are just going to have to learn and learn to implement correctly as they go. Joe Casabona: That’s a really important point. I think Amber made the same point, right? Because Accessibility Checker… I don’t know if you’ve used it. Bet Hannon: Oh, yeah. Joe Casabona: She gave me a pro version. That was an inaudible “oh, yeah.” But the education part is really important. When I look at my blog posts and I see the kind of score I get, it’s like, “Hey, you have two h2 tags in a row here and you skipped an h2 tag or whatever it is.” Because I always forget if the… maybe this is a question you can answer for me. The site title is an h1 in most themes, which means your blog post… Bet Hannon: No, the page title is the h1. Joe Casabona: The page title is the h1. Okay. Bet Hannon: Yeah, yeah. Joe Casabona: So if I’m looking at a blog post… gosh, I should know this, but I don’t right now. If you’re looking at a blog post, should the title of the blog post be an h1 or an h2? Bet Hannon: Well, the title of the post or the page will be the h1. And that should be taken care of in the theme. The theme should handle that for you. And then when you start putting in H tags for kind of organizing your content, you should start with h2s. And you can go you can skip from an h2 to an h2. You just can’t go from an h2 an h4. Joe Casabona: Right. Bet Hannon: I think people often don’t quite understand or get that you shouldn’t use the H tags to style font. Right? Joe Casabona: Right. Bet Hannon: An H4 four can have as big a font as the h3 or the whatever. But you’re kind of organizing the content. I sometimes say it’s like when you were in high school English, and you had to do that outline with the Roman numerals and the capitals and then the lowercase Roman numerals and lowercase letters, and you have to kind of build it out in that way. My team doesn’t like that because “who learns to do that in English class anymore?” is what they tell me. Then I feel old. Joe Casabona: Really? Hold on. We can talk about this in Build Something More because it’s a sidetrack. People don’t learn how to do that in English class anymore? I’m outraged. Bet Hannon: Ohhh, yes. Well, you graduated before No Child Left Behind really diminished education. Joe Casabona: Oh, gosh. Bet Hannon: My wife is a college professor and sometimes what people have not learned in high school is quite astounding. Joe Casabona: Ah, that saddens me. Bet Hannon: Yeah, it is. My team sometimes talks about it as nesting file folders. That’s a different example that you can talk about. Like the whole drawer is the h1 and then you can have h2s and then nested folders. But you have to make sure that you don’t skip any. Joe Casabona: That’s interesting. I’m going to bet like most of my blog posts are inaccessible because I guess it was just always like a mental block for me. I thought the site title was h1, the page titles h2. So I always started in on h3. Bet Hannon: Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Joe Casabona: I better go back and fix all those. I reckon that there’s like… Bet Hannon: A few at a time. And that’s the thing. When people realize that they’ve been doing something incorrectly… I mean, know better, do better. That’s the thing. When you know better you can do better. And so when you realize that you may have not done that correctly over time, it can seem insurmountable. I mean, it just seems like this overwhelming task, I mean, if you have hundreds or thousands of posts to deal with. So the key is start and do a little at a time. Just make a goal to do two of them a week or three a week. It doesn’t take very long once you figure out what you’ve done. And then just kind of make your way through them. There are some tools for doing that. There’s a couple of really great alt tag checker tools. So there’s a free one in the repository—and now I’m going to forget its name, but we can put it in the show notes—that basically when you install the plugin, it’ll show you all the images in your media library and just show you which ones are missing alt tags. Joe Casabona: Oh, great. Bet Hannon: But then you still need to go back and fix them. And then there’s a paid tool, and it costs like $200 a year. I don’t remember the name of it, either, we’ll get into the show notes… Sorry, guys. I know it’s two, guys. Well, one is written by my friend Andrew Wilder and his team, but the other one I don’t even know. But anyway, the paid tool is really nice because it pulls in all existing alt tags. It will use AI to try and generate an alt tag based on what’s there. You have you still have to go in and kind of like say, “Oh, that’s not quite right. Let me actually fill this out.” But it gives you that help, that start. And then when you fix it there using that plugin, it fixes it on every post that’s used that image. So if you have a lot of images, it’s probably worth getting that paid tools. Joe Casabona: Yeah, for sure. For 200 bucks saving you hours of work. That’s really interesting. Because as we’re talking about this, I thought I could probably make a plugin that loops through the content of all of my posts and just bump up the heading. I’d still need to check. Bet Hannon: Yeah. If you knew it, you could do that, I suppose. Joe Casabona: I’d have to make sure it doesn’t go above h2. So I’d have to say, “Is this an h3 change to an h2, or whatever.” It would have to be smarter than just looping. Bet Hannon: If you knew you were consistently making the error, right? Joe Casabona: Yes. For me personally, I’m confident I consistently make that error. You know why I’m confident? I write in Ulysses, which is a fantastic writing app. It’s markdown, and it exports directly to WordPress. And I always start with an h2 for the document title, and it bothers me, and then I do h3 for all subsequent headings. So I know for a fact. Bet Hannon: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you start fixing it, you could do that. You might be able to do that. I got into doing more database query stuff a couple of years ago. We had a really large site with a ton of stuff, and very active site. We were going to be doing a new theme for them. And there’s always that problem where you have the active site where there’s WooCommerce, or an active blog, or whatever, and then like, you’ve got to pull that back together. So I was experimenting with a plugin that purportedly was going to merge in the changes from the production site. And in the testing, it looked all great. But during the time we had it in development, it got stuck in some kind of a loop with Gravity Forms entries. And I had 15 million, with an M, additional extraneous entries. I just had to start learning how to write queries to get stuff out because it was so huge. I couldn’t even get it to load. Joe Casabona: Jeez. That’s horrifying. Bet Hannon: It was crazy. Joe Casabona: There was a plugin a few years back that I guess was not viable market wise. It was bought by Delicious Brains. Bet Hannon: By the time I was looking at this, they’d already pulled that off. Joe Casabona: Oh, man. Bet Hannon: This was another one. But it’s a difficult problem. It’s not an easy problem to solve. Anyway, I learned how to do a little bit of SQL. Joe Casabona: Very nice, very nice. We can talk about that in Build Something More because I have some fun stories. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by TextExpander. In our fast-paced world, things change constantly, and errors in messaging often have significant consequences. With TextExpander, you can save time by converting any text you type into keyboard shortcut called a snippet. Say goodbye to repetitive text entry, spelling and message errors, and trying to remember the right thing to say. When you use TextExpander, you can say the right thing in just a few keystrokes. TextExpander lets you make new approved messaging available to every team member instantly with just a few keystrokes, ensuring your team remains consistent, current, and accurate. TextExpander can also be used in any platform, any app and anywhere you type. So take back your time and increase your productivity. But that’s not all it does. With its advanced snippets, you can create fill-ins, pop-up fields, and more. You can even use JavaScript or AppleScript. I can type out full instructions for my podcast editor, hi, Joel, in just a few keystrokes. Another one of my favorite and most used snippets is PPT. This will take whatever text I have on my keyboard and convert it to plain text. No more fighting formatting is I’m copying from Word or anyplace else. Last month I saved over two hours in typing alone. That doesn’t even take into the account the time I saved by not having to search for the right link, text, address, or number. You have no idea how many times I want to type out a link to a blog post or an affiliate link and I can’t remember it and then I have to go searching for it. That generally takes minutes. But since I have a TextExpander snippet, it takes seconds. TextExpander is available on Mac OS, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, and iPad. I’ve been using it a lot more on my iPhone lately because I’ve been working from my iPhone more because there are days when I’m just not in front of my computer right now. If you’ve been curious about trying TextExpander or simple automation in general, now is the time. Listeners can get 20% off their first year. Just visit textexpander.com/podcast and let them know that I sent you. Thanks so much to TextExpander for sponsoring the show. And now let’s get back to it. Joe Casabona: We haven’t even talked about the service yet, the website accessibility sampling audit. Tell us how that works, how you put it together, why you put it together, all that fun stuff. Bet Hannon: So you might want an accessibility audit of your site to help you know what things are wrong. Like you have been doing some of these things to try and fix things, but there may be still things that you are not sure are problems yet. And it is difficult with accessibility to know… It’s kind of like SEO—knowing where you’re kind of moving toward. It’s a moving target or that’s kind of fuzzy sometimes. So getting an audit is a great thing to do. Traditionally, an accessibility audit would look at every single page in detail and give you a detailed report of every single page of your website. And as you might imagine, that’s a labor-intensive thing because that’s a lot of work. So even if you have a moderate-sized site, it could run you into tens of thousands of dollars. And so what we discovered is that, by and large, if you have problems on with accessibility on your site, you can catch a lot of those with a sample of your content. So we developed an audit that was taking a sample of your content, and then you as the site owner can get this report. And then you have to extrapolate from there. If on your site audit we note that you have images without alt tags, you probably have a lot more than those then on the pages we looked at. So we try to work with folks to do around 25 URLs or so. Even sites that are really big blogs with thousands of posts, you really don’t need more than about three or four posts to do that. Unless you have a blog with a variety of authors. So we try to tell people, you know, try to get all of your page templates represented, try and get a good kind of representative sample of content through time. So like maybe if you start changing and doing better with your H tags now… but we’re only looking at those, we might not pick up that you still have that problem earlier. Joe Casabona: Got you. Bet Hannon: So we want to look at content creation through time. We want to get a variety of the authors on the blog. So maybe one person is continuing to do this one thing that is creating accessibility issues. Look at various features. If you’re doing a WooCommerce site or some other eCommerce site, you know, you want to look at the checkout process, you want to look at its membership site, looking at the process for doing that, and just try to work with them to come up with around 25 URLs to look at in terms of doing that. Joe Casabona: That’s right. And then we produce a big report. Often the reports are more than 15 pages. We actually give them a list of everything we looked for whether or not they violated it so they know what we checked for. We use those automated tools, but then we have human beings checking the page. And then if we run into something where we’re not sure about, we’ll call in our consultants and have people with actual disabilities looking at the content as well. And then we do include an hour of consultation time at the end. So then you can jump into a Zoom call, we can explain it to you, we can demo problems for you, show you why it’s a problem. Some people find that really helpful. If you want, you can bring your… we don’t need to do the remediation. But if you have a regular developer you work with, you can bring them on the call and we can make it more of a technical call about how they might need to fix that or what they might want to do to fix a problem. Joe Casabona: That’s great. That sounds a lot like when Gutenberg first rolled out I created a course, and I basically said like, “How to audit your website to see if it’s ready for Gutenberg.” Very similar. Page templates. I said just like, “Pick a sampling of old and new posts.” But content through time is a very nice, snappy way to put it. I know exactly what you’re saying and I think that’s great. Authors, various features, things like that. And then the one-hour consultation at the end. Patrick Garman came on the show a few weeks ago. They have in a WooCommerce performance site audit, also includes some consultation time. This was not a planned question or anything like that, but do you think that the audit has been a good addition to your business? Do you think it’s helped your business a lot? Because it seems like it’s an idea that’s catching on more, at least in the WordPress space. Bet Hannon: It is. I do think we have to be careful about taking on too many. It takes about two weeks start to finish and we only onboard one a week just because it represents a pretty good chunk of labor for us. And keeping up with our other projects is kind of priority in terms of paying the bills. But it is a good thing. Because most of an accessibility audit is done from the front end, we’re able to do audits on sites that are not WordPress. We can do a Shopify site or a Wix or Weebly site. But those folks don’t tend to want to do those kind of things. But you can do it on any kind of other platforms that someone might want to do. I think people are increasingly concerned. I’m seeing that more niche-driven. So for a bit, we had a ton of audits for food bloggers. So a pretty well-known food blogger got sued around accessibility, and it just raised that awareness for everybody that they… On the one hand, a good number of them are like, “I don’t want to get sued.” But what they also do know that it’s an important thing to do. They can increase their audience, it gives more people access to their content. So they definitely aren’t just anxious about being sued. And I want to be careful about not throwing around the fear-monger kind of thing. Joe Casabona: Right. Right. Bet Hannon: I mean, it is about not getting sued at one level, but it’s also that there are a lot of really great reasons to make your site accessible. Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve said this on the show before. People ask me how I grew my show so quickly, and I think one of the big growth points in the show’s history is when I added transcripts. I saw a definite increase in traffic to the site and even an increase in listenership. Sometimes it’s not just the deaf and hard of hearing who want to read the transcript. It’s people who maybe can’t listen at that moment and or maybe they want to read along while they listen. Bet Hannon: I have seen statistics go by that say that 80% of the videos on LinkedIn are played without sound. Joe Casabona: Wow. Bet Hannon: 80%. It’s very high. It’s pretty high like that for Facebook, too. I think about that, well, one of the times when I’m surfing LinkedIn is in the early morning when I don’t want to wake somebody up, or when I’m in a waiting room somewhere, pre-COVID, or where I just can’t listen. But I sure watch videos go by and yeah, the captions. Joe Casabona: For sure. I mean, that’s super interesting. 80%. That’s wild. For me, it’s usually maybe I listened or watched something and I remember a phrase and I want to find that phrase. So even for those who do listen or watch with the sound on, the transcript or the captions, the searchable text is invaluable to a lot of people. Bet Hannon: Well, you’re getting the search engine juice from that too. Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly. Bet Hannon: Right? Joe Casabona: Yeah. Bet Hannon: When you think about captions, you have to think about whether it is… if it’s a video, often you’re doing captions because the video is conveying something of the conversation or the interaction as well. But for a podcast, doing the transcript… Well, I often do listen to podcasts at time and a half or, you know, I bump it up. If you got a transcript for me to read, it’s much faster. I can read a lot faster than I can listen. Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Awesome. Bet Hannon: So it’s not just situations where I might be time pressed and I just want to skim through stuff. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by the Events Calendar, the original calendar for WordPress. This free plugin helps you with calendaring, ticketing, and more powerful tools to help you manage your events from start to finish. Whether you run school events, concert at a venue, or fundraisers for nonprofits, the Events Calendar gives you the tools you need to make it your own. And with the Events Calendar Pro, you can create custom views, recurring events, add your own custom fields to events, and much more. Run virtual events? No problem. 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Joe Casabona: I know some well-known, big time podcasters who have kind of poo pooed transcripts because they don’t feel the added cost is worth it. And I’m just like, “First of all, you’re making more money than I am podcasting.” Even if you don’t use… Rev is expensive. My virtual assistant transcribes the videos I sent her so I know that she understands the task at hand, and she transcribed a 30-minute video in like three hours. Worth it. Worth it to pay her that. It’s cheaper than Rev. Bet Hannon: And there’s some other services that are up and coming too. And I think we will see more and more of those. Joe Casabona: I’ve been using otter.ai. Any place that offers an educational discount, I’ll grab it. Bet Hannon: I just heard about Otter today in another… I was in a meeting this morning and somebody mentioned that one. Joe Casabona: How funny. Bet Hannon: I hadn’t heard about it. Joe Casabona: What’s that called? That’s called something. You hear about it once and you hear about it everywhere. Bet Hannon: Synchronicity Joe Casabona: Oh, man. Bet Hannon: Oh, no. Joe Casabona: There’s something effect. I’ll look it up for the post-show. But anyway, we could talk tools all day. I mean, I guess that’s helpful, right? It’s an accessibility show. But otter.ai and Descript both offer educational discount, so if you have a .edu address, you can get it at like half price. So I’ll just snag those. I’ve been pretty happy with Otter. There’s a few things, but it’s AI, transcription. Bet Hannon: Right. And I don’t know if it kind of produces a transcript, but I do know that I’ve been seeing going around that Zoom is giving… For Zoom, they’re giving free on the fly too closed captioning for meetings. Joe Casabona: Yes. Bet Hannon: But if that gets saved in a file, that would be checked out. Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Bet Hannon: There’s a way to turn that on in your account. Even if it’s live transcription, stuff like that is often a little buggy. But at least you’ve got something to start with from there. Joe Casabona: Again, you can hire an editor to edit it or have your virtual assistant read through and just spellcheck. It’s probably easier for them. So yeah, absolutely. Gosh, this has been super great. As we wrap up, if somebody wants to get started, maybe they have a website, and they’re not sure if it’s accessible, what are some tips to get started? Bet Hannon: Well, the first would be don’t be tempted by what are called the overlay plugins. So it’s big business right now. Those overlay plugins have huge amounts of venture capital pouring in. So their ads are everywhere, and they want to suck you in with just “buy our service and everything will be taken care of.” And they don’t. So don’t get sucked in with that. And then just start educating yourself about what needs to be there. I’d say the very base kinds of pieces are the things that we’ve already talked about in this podcast. You know, your alt tags and you’re heading tags, and then just start trying to work your way through testing your site, getting your content squared away. But ask questions. There are tons of people out on Twitter and LinkedIn and other places that are, if you have a question, willing to look at that and give you some, you know, not free consulting, but point you in the direction of some resources. Joe Casabona: Awesome. That’s fantastic. And with alt tags—again, I think I brought this up on the show previously, but I do want to drive this point home—it should be as descriptive as reasonably possible. Is that kind of the way to put it? Bet Hannon: Right. Yeah. We have a blog post that should come out on our site in another couple of weeks about alt tags. We’re in process with it. But yeah, you want to make it descriptive of the image, but you never want to put in the word image or photo or graphic or anything like that, because the screen reader reads that out loud. The screen reader already tells someone that it’s an image. And so you would just say, you know, “Father and child playing on the beach on a sunny day.” You know. It shouldn’t be too horribly long but it should be… If it’s a photo of a person, it can say, “Photo of Joe Casabona, an incredibly good-looking Italian man.” Joe Casabona: Well, thank you. You’re making… Bet Hannon: You can embellish your own text. Joe Casabona: Yeah, there you go. People will probably picture like Fabio or something. Maybe Fabio is like old-timey reference and newer, good-looking Italian man. That’s interesting. So “father and daughter on beach on a sunny day” is good. But maybe like, father and daughter on beach sunny day with red pale and father’s wearing like green swim trunks. That’s too much. Bet Hannon: Too much detail. Too much detail. Right. Yeah. Well, the thing you don’t want to do is you don’t want to put anything in a meme-like image with text on the top. People do that a lot. They just go to Canva and they’ll make a little meme thing to promote an event or to promote whatever. The thing is, when you do that, you need to make sure that you’re providing alternatives for that. So you can do it but you just want to make sure that… For instance, we have clients where they’re doing a lot of events driven pieces. They might make that graphic, but then in the text of the post, they need to… so that the alt text on the graphic can say, “Graphic promoting this event, details in the post below.” And then the person can skip into the content and get the details. Joe Casabona: Yeah, details in the post below. That’s another thing that I think Amber mentioned. Go ahead. Bet Hannon: But the thing is, if you only put that little Canva image that’s kind of meme, like, Google can’t see that text either. So you’re not getting any search engine juice off of that. Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. So you wouldn’t necessarily want to have that exact text in the alt tag if it’s also like the title of the post and mentioned in the post below. Is accurate that accurate? Bet Hannon: Right, right. It becomes repetitive. Joe Casabona: Okay. Cool, cool. Bet Hannon: And actually, people who are using screen readers, which the alt text is about people who are using screen readers, like the rest of us, they skim through content. When we all go to a website, we just skim through, and we’re looking at the headings, and we’re looking for what interests us. We’re not really reading every word. So people who are using screen readers are skimming through, and they’re skimming through to look at the headings, H tags, come back to play on the links. And you want to make sure your links are set up so that the link text, the part that gets underlined or made into a colorable or whatever that effect is, but that link text is descriptive because often they’re just skimming through the text and having the screen reader read out that text to them. So if all of your link texts say “click here,” “click here,” “click here,” there’s no context. They’re gone. Joe Casabona: Oh, jeez. Wow. All right. Lots of really good… Bet Hannon: So “click here to learn more about accessibility. Click here to do blah, blah, blah. Click here to download a blah, blah.” Joe Casabona: Yeah. Love that. Right. And then I guess the same with buttons. You don’t just want to say like, “Click here.” You want to say like, “Enroll today” is usually what I put. But maybe I put “enroll today in Podcast Liftoff” or whatever. Bet Hannon: Right. I mean, yes, potentially. And then you remembering that buttons are really just links. Joe Casabona: This will be the last question before we wrap up. We’ve been talking forever. Bet Hannon: [inaudible 00:51:51] Joe Casabona: I know. I know. It’s just such a great conversation. This is mostly for me, and I hope the listeners are getting something out of it. With anchor tags, you can add a title text, right? Bet Hannon: Mm hmm. Joe Casabona: What’s the utility of the title text? Can I say like, “Enroll in the clickable tags” and then have a title that has more context? Or is that kind of like frowned upon? Bet Hannon: Oh, you’re asking me more of a technical question now. I’m sure there’s an answer, but I don’t know. Joe Casabona: All right. I mean, that’s a good answer too because that means at least you weren’t presented with some hard opinion on it. I’ll find something… Bet Hannon: You gotta remember I’m very rarely any more in the content in that way. Joe Casabona: I’ll find the link for the show notes for that because that’s… Bet Hannon: Cool. Joe Casabona: Again, we didn’t talk about that. It just came to my brain and I wanted to ask. Bet Hannon: Yeah, for sure. Joe Casabona: Before we wrap up, you gave us some great tips, do you have any trade secrets for us? Bet Hannon: Oh, yeah. Just don’t get hooked into those overlay things. They are… I really try not to say this very often, but they’re really kind of evil. A, they purport to fix all your problems, but they can only deal with the 30% that’s AI. They kind of make it sound like you won’t get sued if you use them. But that’s not really the case. Actually, we’re seeing some cases where people are being targeted because they’re using them. And the predatory lawsuit people know that they can’t take care of everything. They’re hooking people in a way that just feels kind of manipulative and not very… just not a good heart behind that. Joe Casabona: It’s snake oil. Bet Hannon: It’s snake oil. It really is. And because it’s an overlay, so it’s fixing some of those accessibility problems on the fly as your page is loading, which is adds extra bloat, slows your site down, do those increasingly focusing on speed. So it’s not great for your search engine kind of results and all of that as well. And when you stopped paying for that service, all of those problems are still there. You haven’t fixed anything. You’re paying all that money to the service over time and nothing’s getting fixed. Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. So these overlay products are not like, “Here’s what’s wrong.” It’s like, “Here’s what we’re telling you is wrong and we’re just going to add a little JavaScript to fix it or whatever.” Bet Hannon: It’s like, “We will try and fix the things we can fix.” So they’ll use AI to put in alt tags, which may or may not be correct. They’re just guessing at the alt tags. And then they put these little, they put some little tools over on the side. Well, if you are a person that has a tool, an accessibility tool that you use on the web, if you have a screen magnifier or you already use some kind of colorblind filter thing, you have tools that you already are familiar with that you have installed that you want to use. And so those little accessibility tools things, it’s kind of like, look at me, I’m trying to be accessible is what it comes down to. And for people with disabilities, it’s sort of like saying to them, “Hey, you should leave the tools that you like and all the shortcuts for to use my second rate thing that’s going to come…” Because those tools conflict them. They create a conflict. So you should leave the tools that you know, and like, and know all the shortcuts to and use my special tool over here that I paid minimal bucks for.” Joe Casabona: It’s almost like a virtual signal. Bet Hannon: It’s frustrating. It’s a virtue signal but it’s really… it’s like telling the person in the wheelchair, “You got steps in front of your restaurant, you need to go around and use the ramp and come to the kitchen.” Joe Casabona: Jeez. Bet Hannon: It’s really offensive. Joe Casabona: Absolutely. And it just goes to show you, right? Because… Bet Hannon: I get that people want to be concerned about accessibility, but take some time to think it through in. Joe Casabona: Yeah. I mean, be concerned and then find an actual solution and not some Band-Aid that you bought at the dollar store. Bet Hannon: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Those services are not cheap either. And that’s the thing. Over time, you’re paying a lot of money, but it’s not really getting fixed. It’s just a kind of a cover-up that’s going to go away when you stop paying. Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. It just goes to show you that the best way you can be accessible is to write good semantic HTML and know the best practices. That’s just… Bet Hannon: Yeah, exactly. Joe Casabona: Awesome. Bet Hannon: Know better and do better. Joe Casabona: Yeah, know better and do better. I love it. Bet, this has been such a great hour we’ve been talking for. We may talk about other stuff in Build Something More. So be sure to catch our pre-show where we talk about craft beer, our post-show where we talk a little bit more over a build something club. Bet, if people want to learn more about you, and they should, where can they go to find you? Bet Hannon: You can find me on Twitter @BetHannon, and then our website is bhmbizsites.com. Joe Casabona: Fantastic. I will link those and lots of stuff that we talked about. This is a tool-heavy episode. So it’s going to be long show notes over and howibuilt.it/219. Bet, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Bet Hannon: It’s been great. Thanks for having me. Joe Casabona: Thanks to everybody listening. I really appreciate it. Thanks to our sponsors, TextExpander, Restrict Content Pro, and the Events Calendar. Until next time, get out there and build something. Sponsored by:Restrict Content Pro: Launch your membership site TextExpander: Get 20% off your first year by visiting the this link. The Events Calendar Source

Did you know, we launched the Doing Design Festival on January 29 2021? Hello and welcome to another episode of Bringing Design Closer. My name is Gerry Scullion, and I’m a service designer, and founder of This is HCD and CEO of This is Doing - we provide live online design and innovation classes, providing training for service designers, design researchers, product managers, user experience designers and much more. Today on the show, we have Laura Kalbag, a wonderful Designer and co-founder of Small Technology Foundation, an organisation focussed on building a more rights-respecting web. They’ve produced some really great things, one of the tools that I use from them is a privacy tool called Better (check it out) Anyway - we speak lots of different things in this podcast, and cover topics related to accessibility and it’s an interconnectedness with Privacy - I thoroughly loved speaking with Laura, and have links to all of their websites and initiatives, including Laura’s book called Accessibility for Everyone by A Book Apart listed below. If you like Laura's work, please support Small Technology Foundarion's work by donating. Let’s get into it. Laura's website / https://laurakalbag.com/ Small Technology Foundation / https://small-tech.org/ Support & fund STF / https://small-tech.org/fund-us/ Buy Laura's book / https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone   Become a Premium Member: https://thisishcdnetwork.supercast.tech See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Did you know, we launched the Doing Design Festival on January 29 2021? Hello and welcome to another episode of Bringing Design Closer. My name is Gerry Scullion, and I’m a service designer, and founder of This is HCD and CEO of This is Doing - we provide live online design and innovation classes, providing training for service designers, design researchers, product managers, user experience designers and much more. Today on the show, we have Laura Kalbag, a wonderful Designer and co-founder of Small Technology Foundation, an organisation focussed on building a more rights-respecting web. They’ve produced some really great things, one of the tools that I use from them is a privacy tool called Better (check it out) Anyway - we speak lots of different things in this podcast, and cover topics related to accessibility and it’s an interconnectedness with Privacy - I thoroughly loved speaking with Laura, and have links to all of their websites and initiatives, including Laura’s book called Accessibility for Everyone by A Book Apart listed below. If you like Laura's work, please support Small Technology Foundarion's work by donating. Let’s get into it. Laura's website / https://laurakalbag.com/ Small Technology Foundation / https://small-tech.org/ Support & fund STF / https://small-tech.org/fund-us/ Buy Laura's book / https://abookapart.com/products/accessibility-for-everyone   Become a Premium Member: https://thisishcdnetwork.supercast.tech See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Accessibility and usability are core to our profession. Despite this fact, they often don't take center stage. Many designers even feel that putting too much emphasis on them can take away from pushing creative boundaries. In this episode, Tom and Craig chat about the tensions that exist between these aspects of our profession. We all love a good analogy. So why not explore how these topics can be further understood through the analogy of construction, architecture, and interior design? Check out Accessibility for Everyone by Laura Kalbag (one of our fellow Ireland based designers!) for a great read on accessibility.

In this discussion with Laura and Hey! founder Josh Nesbitt, we’ll cover technologies that improve our everyday lives as well as powering online movements, and how those same technologies can be used against us. Over the past few years, Laura has invested her time fighting for the regulation of surveillance capitalism, while building alternatives in her work for the Small Technology Foundation. In today’s world, activism increasingly relies on technology, making now a more important time than ever to discuss how technology can be used quickly and safely to spread facts and support action. Do you have any thoughts on the topics covered or your own experiences? Join the conversation and let us know with a review or via our social media channels. Subscribe for future episodes.

We’re talking about online privacy. What should web developers be doing to make sure the privacy of our users is maintained? Drew McLellan talks to an expert on the subject, Laura Kalbag, to find out.

This is part two of a special episode of Presentable recorded live in front of an audience at the New Adventures conference in Nottingham, England. It is a roundtable conversation with the event's speakers: Liz Jackson, Laura Kalbag, Florence Okoye, Tatiana Mac

This interview is part of a five-piece series: On Tour @ #thinkabout19. In May we attended the Think About Conference – a new conference in Cologne Ehrenfeld about design and developmentand the influence and, as a fresh take, the impact of both on our society. And they nailed it! The two-track conference was extremely well […]

This interview is part of a five-piece series: On Tour @ #thinkabout19. In May we attended the Think About Conference – a new conference in Cologne Ehrenfeld about design and developmentand the influ…

Cloud Reachers is all about the future of learning, and the changing roles of teachers and learners. Hosted by Tomi Kauppinen and Miikka J. Lehtonen from the Finland-based multidisciplinary Aalto University.Inspiring educators and education designers all over the world are creating engaging learning settings and experiences. In Cloud Reachers podcast we sit down with experts to discuss what they are doing to push the envelope on transforming learning across different organizations.

Laura Kalbag, author of Accessibility for Everyone, joins us at From Business To Buttons to talk about accessibility and also disruptive design patterns. We discuss accessibility by default, data collection and business models as well as using the web for good. “engagement that doesn’t serve a users’ intentions is addiction.” Laura Kalbag (Listening time: 35... The post #211 Disruptive design patterns with Laura Kalbag appeared first on UX Podcast.

In this episode Laura and Liz discuss ethical brand design, toxic technology and dark patterns, the need for tech industry diversity, accessibility and inclusivity, how we can be more ethical as designers, how we need to make sure we are working with ethical companies and lots more

Writing a book is hard. Writing a book as a woman in tech is even harder. So what happens when some mansplainer comes along to rain on your well-earned parade? Laura Kalbag tells us about how she found the courage to write, why listening to women reminds her of what’s important, and how she keeps her cool even in the face of jerks. Laura is a designer and the cofounder of Ind.ie, a not-for-profit that works on protecting people’s rights in the digital age—and the author of Accessibility for Everyone. She works tirelessly to champion web accessibility—that is, making websites and apps usable for as many people as possible, including those with disability—and believes the best online experiences are ethical and inclusive. When she wrote her first book, she embarked on a journey: from doubting whether she could do it, to gracefully handling a high-profile mansplainer, to getting the attention of J.K. Rowling and Roxane Gay. All before publication day. > I don’t care about impressing little men. That’s not my job. I care about trying to reach the right people with the messages that I care about. I care about trying to make the web more inclusive, trying to make the web more ethical, and if people aren’t bothered about that, then I’m not bothered about them, quite honestly. > — Laura Kalbag , cofounder of Ind.ie and author of Accessibility for Everyone We talk about: Cofounding Ind.ie, which focuses on building technology to protect people’s privacy and rights online. What it’s like to run a company with your partner when you have wildly differing work schedules, and why respect and trust are key. The Ethical Design Manifesto: a guide Laura created to help folks make more sustainable design choices. How she navigated the book-writing and publishing process—from self-doubt to self-promotion. What it’s like to be on the receiving end of some of the worst mansplaining we’ve ever seen—and how to keep on being awesome, anyway. Follow Laura : Twitter | Ind.ie Plus: Sara and Katel share their adventures from Werk It, a women’s podcast festival, where they learned tons and got to spend two days surrounded by amazing women and non-binary folks in excellent outfits. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers for more. Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Try it free, then use code NOYOUGO to get 50% off your first paid month. StoryWorth—the easy and fun way for your loved ones to share their stories. Get weekly prompts emailed, and a beautiful hardcover book at the end of the year.  Get $20 off your StoryWorth now at storyworth.com/nyg.   Transcript Sara Wachter-Boettcher Today’s show is brought to you by Harvest, my go-to tool for tracking time, invoices and clients. It’s easy to use on desktop or mobile and it’s great for both freelancers and large companies. And it just makes it easier for you to do things like get paid. See all the features and try it free at getharvest.com. And when you upgrade to a paid account, you are going to want to enter the code “noyougo” at checkout for fifty percent off your first month. That’s getharvest.com, code “noyougo.” [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out] SWB Hey everyone, I’m Sara! Katel LeDu And I’m Katel. SWB And you’re listening to No, You Go, the show about building satisfying careers and businesses— KL — getting free of toxic bullshit— SWB —and living your best feminist life at work. KL Today we’re talking to Laura Kalbag, someone both of us have known for a while. Laura is a designer and the co-founder of a not-for-profit called Ind.ie and she’s also the author of a book I got to publish—Accessibility for Everyone. It was really great getting to know her throughout that project and I’m so glad we got to talk to her about her work and what it was like to write a book. SWB I loved talking with Laura and something that she mentioned in her interview that I was hoping we could start with is that you reached out to her to write this book, right? KL Yeah, we totally did. SWB Okay, so last week on the show you mentioned that a couple of years ago you realized that A Book Apart had been mostly publishing books by white guys. And [laughs] you really wanted to change that and so you were starting to try to figure out ways to get more diverse authors. Was reaching out the Laura kind of part of that effort? KL Yeah, so we had always really relied on people with good ideas to come to us and pitch and it was mostly we were kind of waiting for folks to just send us pitches and that’s how it worked for a while. But, well, that’s sort of how we ended up with all those white guys. So around that same time when we were thinking about this, we had noticed that Laura was doing really great work around accessibility on the web. She was speaking and writing about it and we could see that she was already articulating some of the concepts we’d wanted an accessibility book to focus on. So, we decided to reach out to her to see if she would even be interested. SWB Well, obviously she was because she wrote the book, but in the interview, she also talked about how she didn’t know if she knew enough to write a book or if she would have enough material. She was like, “I never would have done this on my own. I wouldn’t have submitted this proposal on my own.” And I totally relate to that because I have felt that way every single time I’ve written a book and that’s three books and it has not changed! [laughs] [2:38] KL [laughing] I mean, yeah. SWB And so I feel really lucky that there were other people who are out there who advocated for me—there were people who nudged me when I needed to be nudged—because I think that without that, I don’t think I would have written any of them. I mean, I really didn’t know what exactly I had in me until somebody kind of tapped me on the shoulder. And one of the things that has been really interesting for me to think about is how you’re doing that as a publisher, but that doesn’t have to come from a publisher, that can come from lots of places. For me, the only time a publisher did that was on book number three, but for the first two, it was people I looked up to in my field and that was super important. KL Who was the first person who did that for you? SWB It was actually Kristina Halvorson. Some of our listeners probably know who she is. If you come from user experience and content strategy, that name is really familiar. She is the author of a book as well and pretty big proponent for content strategy and runs conferences. And so, you know, this is kind of something that she does. But when she reached out to me, it was like 2011, it was before I had ever really spoken at a conference. I hadn’t done much of anything public really. I mean, I’d written a few blog posts. That was really what I had done is I’d written a few blog posts. And she got me the phone one day and she was just like, “you should write a book and Louis Rosenfeld”—the guy who runs Rosenfeld Media—she’s like, “and Louis Rosenfeld’s going to publish it.” And I was taken aback. I was not expecting this at all. KL Yeah. SWB I remember that she DMed me to say, “hey, can I get you on the phone?” I was at work one day at my job I was totally burned out at and I was like, “I’ve no idea where this is going, but I’ve got to go somewhere because I’m really miserable right now and this is very exciting.” KL Yeah. SWB So anyway, so—I figured, “well, I don’t know that I believe in me, but she seems to believe in me, so I’m going to see where this goes. And if Louis says that he wants me to write a book for him, I’ll do it. I might do it badly [both laugh], but I’m going to give it a shot!” And so that’s what I did and, you know, I haven’t opened that book in a while because looking at your past work is tough. So, I don’t know how I would feel about everything in it today, but I would say that a lot of people have told me that was really really helpful to them—getting them to understand a concept of structured content, which isn’t important for this particular conversation—but getting people to understand that at a time when a lot of people in my field found that very confusing and breaking it down and making it easy for them. And I think that that was really all I ever wanted, right? Like wanting other people to understand the things that I had found really helpful for me in my work. And so I mean definitely big thanks to Kristina because that was such a pivotal moment for me. [5:20] KL That’s so incredible. I really wish everyone could have that. I mean, I feel like this is part of what made us want to start that research we mentioned earlier this season where we interviewed people and sent out a survey asking folks about building their career visibility. And it was so exciting to start talking to people about how they built their profiles—finding out what was easy, what wasn’t and I think we’re seeing some ways we could help folks feel more empowered to go pitch a book proposal, or a conference talk, or start writing and actually share that writing. SWB Or like start podcasting? KL Yeah! [SWB laughs] SWB Yeah, no, I want to focus on this a lot more this coming year, you know, 2018 is almost over and I feel like I’m just kind of coasting into the holidays now. [both laugh] But for 2019, this is a big goal of mine, right? I want to help more people have the same kinds of pivotal career moments that I got to have. And something that I’ve been thinking a lot about is mine have been really ad hoc, right? Kristina Halvorson happened to notice my work—I mean, she was paying attention, it wasn’t totally random. But she happened to notice my work, she happened to have recently had a conversation with Louis Rosenfeld, who was somebody she already knew as a peer—about what he was looking for for his publishing house next, and then she had the kindness and was willing to give the time to reach out to me and to kind of help me along and encourage me and helped me make connections, right? She was the one who introduced me to Louis and that at the time felt a little bit scary—I wasn’t going to just email that person out of the blue. And so that’s something that I definitely have tried to do for other people now that I’m in a more comfortable place or a place where I feel like I have a lot more credibility and people kind of know who I am. I definitely send out recommendations like, “oh you should really get this person at your conference,” or try to connect people to book publishers or whatever kind of opportunities they’re looking for—recommending people for jobs or contracts. Whatever it is, right? Because I feel like that is one of the ways that I can make sure that a wider range of people are getting access to opportunities and also that when I know people are out there with really great ideas or doing really great work that they are getting recognized for it. But it’s not enough to just do it at that ad hoc level. I think that that’s great and I’m glad I’m doing that and everybody should do that. I hope anybody who has the power to do it does it. But I just think that there’s so much room to do this at a more systemic level. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to projects like Women Talk Design, which I think we’ve mentioned before in our newsletter, where they are curating this big collection of women and non-binary speakers and the talks that those people have given because they’re really trying to get more women in front of conference organizers and to make sure that event organizers are never going like well, I don’t know where to find anybody who can talk about X or Y who’s not a man. KL Right. SWB Because that’s not true, they just don’t know where to look, right? KL Yeah, exactly. SWB So, they’re saying, “no we’re going to try to do this at a broader scale” but I still feel like there’s so much more to work on here. I want to help people figure out, you know, what do they want to talk or write about, what do they really want to share? What are the things that they figured out that have really helped them in their work that they feel like other people would benefit from if they just knew about them? How can we help people figure out what those things are? How can we make it easier for them to organize their ideas and share their ideas because something Laura mentioned is that it wasn’t until she sat down and wrote an outline and really put together all of her ideas that she could see that she did in fact have a body of work there—she had a lot of material and she had opinions! [9:05] KL Yes! SWB And I think though that sitting down, writing an outline and getting all of your opinions into one place—that’s a super fucking daunting task if you’re doing it by yourself. That’s so hard, I wouldn’t do it. KL Yeah, absolutely. SWB And so it’s like, how do you get yourself to that place mentally? Well, you need some help probably and what if we could give people more tools for that and more opportunities for that where they felt like they had that support? KL Definitely. And yeah, I mean talking to Laura got me so inspired to sit down and really get to work on this—figuring out if we want to write a book on this, or give workshops, or who knows! Because we—we totally need more voices like Laura’s. SWB I think we’ve talked about her interview enough. I think everybody needs to hear it now. KL Definitely. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out] SPONSOR: STORY WORTH KL I just sent my mom the coolest gift for her birthday, thanks to our sponsor this week, Story Worth. I’ve always loved the idea of recording some of our family history, but I never really knew where to start or how to do it. Frankly, it kind of seemed complicated. But Story Worth helps you share a family stories in a very easy way. Here’s how it works. I just went to storyworth.com, signed up with my email address, invited my mom to tell her story, and that’s it. Story Worth will send her weekly questions prompting her to tell a story, which she can write or record. She has some really interesting stories that I want to know more about and keep forever—like how she met my dad in the Peace Corps or Benin in West Africa or how she had to tread water for half an hour holding a brick over her head to train as a lifeguard. So, Story Worth lets her do that and I love that any data she shares stays safe and secure on their site. And at the end of the year, we get an awesome hardcover keepsake book to share and pass around the whole family. You know, she’s such an important woman to me and I’m so excited to hear more about and celebrate her. And I can’t wait to share Story Worth with her. It’s such a perfect birthday gift and hey, the holidays are coming up too! So, if you want to record and share your own stories or invite your friends and family to join in the fun, go to storyworth.com/nyg to get started. And right now No, You Go listeners get $20 off. That’s s-t-o-r-y-w-o-r-t-h dot com slash nyg. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out] [11:20] INTERVIEW: LAURA KALBAG SWB Laura Kalbag is an author and the co-founder of Ind.ie, a not-for-profit that works on protecting people’s rights in the digital age. Katel even got to work with Laura when she wrote Accessibility for Everyone for A Book Apart—something that then got the attention of folks like JK Rowling and Roxane Gay. Yes. I am so excited that Laura is here to talk with us about that and about all the incredible work that she does. Laura, thank you for joining us on No, You Go. Laura Kalbag Thank you for having me. It’s really exciting to be able to talk on a podcast with two people who’ve actually given me great opportunities in my career themselves. SWB Oh, [laughs] that’s lovely to hear, but I think that both Katel and I have been big fans of yours for a while, so we are excited to have you. LK It’s very, very exciting. SWB So, let’s start out with talking about Ind.ie. Can you tell us a little bit about Ind.ie and what led you to start that company? LK It really started out sort of about five or six years ago, particularly when the Edward Snowden Revelations came out. So, when Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA in the US and how governments were sucking up a lot of our information about what we were doing online and spying on us in that way. And we were talking about this a lot because it was something that really impacted our work. We’re building things for the web and we’re using the web all the time. What we were wondering though is why is so much information being sucked up? Why is so much stuff about what we’re doing, what we’re looking at, who we are already being sucked up by big corporations—the social media and things like that. They’re already collecting the information and that’s what makes it easy for governments to get hold of it as well. And so what we started to do is look into ways of how can we build technology that doesn’t make it so easy for governments to surveil us and helps protect people’s rights. SWB So what are the things that you’ve been working on as part of Ind.ie is a little app called Better, right? Can you tell us about that? LK Yeah. So, what Better does is, it protects you while you’re browsing the web and it does that by blocking trackers that are trying to follow you around the web—so the kinds of trackers that might retarget advertising at you. So, you might be on a site and you might be looking at something you want to buy like a nice new dress or something like that. And then you find that same dress showing up on ads on every single other website you’re visiting. And that’s an instance of when you’re being tracked by a tracker in their sort of background of the site. And they’re using that information that it’s you on that website to show you that ad again and again. And there are all kinds of different trackers doing all kinds of different things behind the scenes. And so what we do is we curate our own list where we decide what we think is a potentially harmful tracker and we block it for you, so that when you’re browsing the web—it only works on Safari for Mac and for iPhone for iOS—but when you’re using Safari, you don’t have to have those trackers watching everything that you’re doing. [14:27] SWB And since you’ve been sort of getting that out into the community, what kind of response have you gotten from it? LK It’s very interesting. I think a lot of people agree with what we’re doing because we are doing it for the reason of protecting people’s privacy because we want to keep people safe. The people whose privacy is most at risk are people who are most vulnerable. It’s people who do not want their governments to necessarily know what their location is. That could be undocumented immigrants, it could be people whose lives they don’t necessarily want to share with corporations and things like that. So, that could be perhaps if you’re gay in a country where you’re not allowed to be—where homosexuality is banned—you don’t want that kind of information getting into the hands of people who could then pass that on to your government or to someone that could cause harm to you. And so what we’re doing is really trying to protect people’s privacy. It very much varies from ad blockers. So, what we mostly get compared to is ad blockers and a lot of people download Better expecting it to block ads. And it does because what we’re doing is blocking the tracking and the tracking actually tends to block 99.99% of all ads because most ads are based on profiling you and sort of examining your underlying behaviour. But if an ad is just a link, just a picture, just a bit of text, we don’t block that. We’re not trying to prevent people from making money on the web, we’re just trying to prevent people from invading the privacy of the people visiting the web. SWB And so you bring up the whole advertising model of the internet and that makes me want to ask a little bit about the business model that you’re using when it comes to Ind.ie. So, I know that a lot of your work is—it’s a tiny team and that you have a lot of it being supported by donors and patrons, right? So, how does it work for you to run this type of company? LK A lot of it is trying to find ways to be financially sustainable and not being hypocritical about what we do. Because we don’t want to take money from people if they’re doing it because they want to get good PR from us or if they want to get something sneaky in exchange. So, we make money from selling the app. It’s one of the reasons why we make an app that goes on an app store because Apple is one of the few ways you can make money with apps. And we make money from doing things like going around and talking at conferences and events. And we’ve raised a little bit of money for research—we’ve got funding for research into creating an alternative model for social networking in a way that the people can have ownership and control over their own information and over their own data. So, what we’re trying to do is bring all these different ways of making money together. It’s much like I think a lot of not-for-profits —their financial situations. You’re trying to make enough money to keep doing what you want to be doing and what you think is important to do. [17:35] SWB And now, you founded Ind.ie with your partner Aral, right? So, what’s it like to build a business with your partner? LK It’s really great in a lot of ways and in other ways it can be very difficult because we live and work together, so that’s spending a lot of time together. And so we have to find strategies where we have our own space, we do our own things. We do things in our own way as well because both of us have predominantly both been entirely independent in our professional lives, so we’ve both run our own businesses before. And so bringing those two things together with two people who are—like to have control over how they do things and have very set ways of getting things done—we’ve had to do a lot of work and we’re continuing to do a lot of work to be effective together and to be able to do things together. But it’s really nice to feel like you’re working towards something together. A lot of people can find their work kind of leaking into their lives and I don’t mind that a lot of the time because it’s actually nice to have something you’re both passionate about and you both want to work on together. SWB Yeah, that’s interesting. You know, we talk on the show sometimes about things like balance between work and personal life and sort of how to make sure that you can turn off work. But I think there is also the story that I totally relate to that’s around saying that, you know, I’m sharing this thing that I really care about that I share with my partner and this thing that I really care about that I spend a lot of my time on is something that I don’t mind bleeding over into everything else, that I like this feeling of it all being part of the sort of like, cohesive view of who I am and what matters to me. LK I love it, but I also love having a good balance. And that’s one of the ways where we completely vary because Aral has no sense of balance whatsoever. He won’t be offended [laughing] by me saying that. [SWB laughs] He will work late at night, he’ll work all weekend. I work very strict hours. I like to get started at a good time in the morning, I work until the evening. I’ll go off, I’ll do dog walks during the day sometimes. I don’t work weekends unless I really, really have to if there’s a deadline or an emergency or something because I can’t keep myself sane and well if I work all the time. And he’ll allow himself some down days and things like that, but that’s how he does it. And so I say to him sometimes, “I know you really want to talk about this thing tonight and you want to start working on it tonight, but I’m not going to, so you’re have to wait until the morning.” [20:12] SWB Is that hard to do? I mean, that’s a lot easier to do if your coworker is emailing you at 10 pm—you just ignore it. It’s a little harder when that person is [LK laughs] across the dining table from you. LK Yeah. We try to keep different spaces in the house as well, so that we can be working on things separately and someone can have time to just chill out and play computer games or whatever and not feel like the other person is in their peripheral vision working, making them feel guilty that they’re not doing stuff. Because it can be really difficult in that way. But I think one of the things we’ve really had to learn about working together is respecting each other’s way of working and respecting what works for each other because we know we have very different personalities to begin with. We both have very different ways to work, ways we enjoy working, and ways we find work fulfilling. And so we have to respect that in each other. SWB It sounds like that takes a lot of trust. I mean, because you can’t really work with somebody and allow them to do things the way they want to do it unless you fundamentally trust that they know what’s going to be best for their own work. LK Yeah. I think we know that we’re working from the same guiding principles, that we care about trying to protect people’s rights, we care about speaking out about things, speaking out about sort of surveillance capitalism, as they call it. The idea that this business model where people are making money from your data and trying to do things in a way that understands that a lot of people aren’t privileged and do not have the technical knowledge, do not have the time or the money to be able to make the web safe for themselves. And so we’re trying to work towards solutions that work for a mainstream audience. And these are our kind of guiding principles that we both know we agree on and if we feel like one or the other of us is not really sticking to that, we can call each other out on it too. We have to have that kind of relationship where we’re willing to take criticism, as well as give it. SWB That’s great. And I want to pick up on something you touched on there a second ago. You talked a little bit about making work accessible. And I know that you’ve built a big focus on accessibility in your work. I mean, you wrote a book [laughs] about accessibility which we’re going to talk about here in a second. Can you tell our listeners who aren’t from tech or design what you mean when you talk about accessibility and why it’s something you care so much about? [22:39] LK When I talk about my book specifically, and the things that are in my book, that’s really focused on making the web accessible to people with disabilities. And so it’s this idea of a lot of the ways that we build things on the web can be exclusive to people who have disabilities because we’re not paying attention to how some people need to consume content in a different way. They may not be able to read it, they may be using something to read the screen to them, rather than reading the texts themselves. They might need to have subtitles because they can’t hear what’s going on on the web. So, that is about trying to make the web easier for people with disabilities to use. But that extends out into so many different things that we do because it’s about making something that’s written in a very technical way easier to understand for people who are maybe starting out and don’t have those technical skills yet or people who don’t want those technical skills, have plenty of other things to do with their lives, and just want to be able to understand how something works. And so, I’m trying to work on applying accessibility to absolutely everything that I do—always trying to be better at making the things that I design easier to use and understand by as many people as possible. SWB And so the other thing that I wanted to ask a little bit about that I think ties into that is something that I know you’ve worked on at Ind.ie, which is the ethical design manifesto. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how that fits into the picture? LK The ethical design manifesto is first of all, making sure that what we’re building respects human rights. Because it’s all very good making something that’s beautiful, making something that’s fun to use. I mean, the products that we have on the web, we’re pretty good at doing that kind of stuff—making stuff fun. We know and talk about things like user experience. But actually, unless the core of the product actually respects human rights. I mean, if the core of the products we’re making actively does not respect human rights, then what are we doing with the products we’re making? So, it’s things like making sure that the products we build respect people’s rights by respecting their privacy, keeping things private, making them accessible, making them sustainable—both financially sustainable and not having a negative environmental impact—making things interoperable—allowing people to move their data around if they want to. And then once we’ve done all of that, once we’ve got products that respect human rights, then we can focus on the doing things we do well in the industry like respecting human effort— so, understanding that people put a lot of time and effort in when they’re using our products, so we want to make sure that the products we build a functional and convenient and reliable. And then once we’ve achieved all of that, we can look at focusing on the experience—making things delightful and things like that. I really enjoy quoting Sara on this when I talk about it in talks and it’s—I think you say something like not spreading a thin layer of bullshit in order to cover up things that just aren’t working. [laughs] It’s not like twinkle—sprinkling a little bit of fairy dust on top of something that’s rubbish. [26:05] SWB Yes. So, we talked a little bit about the book that you wrote and I would love to talk about that further because, Katel, you actually got to publish that book, right? KL Yeah. So, actually a few years ago, the team at A Book Apart had been wanting to publish an accessibility book. And we knew we wanted to reach out to you, Laura, because you were doing such great work around the topic, clearly. And then Accessibility for Everyone came out in 2017. How did you decide to write that book with us? LK Well, I’m very glad you asked because I never would have offered. I have never really been in the position where I would have had the confidence to say, “oh I can write a book about this.” But actually, as I started to think about the outline and the proposal that I was going to write and what I wanted to say, I realized, “oh actually I have loads to say about accessibility” and actually over the years—because it’s been something I care about so much—I’ve accumulated so much information about different ways to make websites more accessible for people with disabilities that it would be really great to be able to share that. I had so many bookmarks and so many things and so many great people that I follow. And I like the idea of being able to take accessibility as a topic that can seem very big and very intimidating and give an introduction to it that applies to a lot of different disciplines within the web profession. So, how it applies to writing code, how it applies to designing and doing things like choosing color palettes, and how it applies to even writing text and writing copy. And so I love the idea of being able to be that bridge to the people that really had huge levels of expertise as well. KL And it was—it just came together so well. I think exactly what you are talking about really shines through in the book. It’s very informative for folks who are getting up to speed about it and need to really get a lay of the land. You’ve talked before about how your brother, Sam, has cerebral palsy and that probably sparked some of the interest in the topic for you. And you talk about him in the book, which is awesome. You mentioned that you sat down with him and talked with him about how he uses the internet when you were writing the book. What did you learn from that? [28:26] LK Well, it was really funny because before I started writing the book I hadn’t even thought about how my brother having a disability affected how I saw the world and how much I cared about accessibility. I hadn’t actually connected those two things together because I—growing up with Sam, he’s been my brother since I was three years old—I’m three years older than him—and so, our whole lives have been making little accommodations around his need. He can walk, but not well. He has mild cerebral palsy, He finds balance very difficult, he has learning difficulties often associated with cerebral palsy and difficulty with things like fine motor control as well. So, throughout our lives together—and we spend a lot of time together—we’ve always been doing things like—I’d read a menu to him in the restaurant. He could do it, but we get there quicker if we do it together. I know to give him my arm on my right side when we’re walking somewhere just to make it a bit easier for both of us. And I’d never really watched him use a computer before because it’s not the kind of thing you sit and watch somebody else do. So, what we did is one day, we sat there on the phone and I got him to talk through all the things that he hated about using the web and the things that he loved and the things that really helped him. And it gave me a really nice insight into his particular use and what it also really revealed to me was how different everyone’s use of the web is. How because we’re not watching each other use computers, use our device every day, we don’t necessarily realize that we all have different ways of doing things. We all type in different ways, we all read in different ways, we all—some of us open a million tabs, some of us only have one tab open. We will do these things so differently and what it really shows is the need for inclusivity and making websites accessible. What it shows is the assumptions that we make are usually very wrong. KL Did you do any other kinds of research for the book or did anything surprise you as you were writing it? LK What always surprised me was the many different ways that every time you talk to new people, they let you in on a different way that they use something or a different way that they access something. So, I did a lot of research into the different forms of input that people use with the web. We think that it’s quite a lot when people are using laptops and iPads and iPhones and all different brands of tablets and things and even watches to access the web now. What we don’t tend to think about is how people might use things like screen readers, which read the contents of the screen to you as audio, or things like eye tracking, so you can have this device that tracks your eyes, so that you can use your eyes to show where you want to go on the page, what you want to interact with. The same—you can do it—there’s these buttons that you can use if you have difficulty with motor control, you press the button, so it scrolls through all of the different options on the screen and you press the button when it gets to the part that you want. And there are so many different ways to interact with computers using all of these different things. So, when we’re trying to create experiences on the web and we’re really focusing on exactly how one tiny little element should work and exactly how we want it to be, we need to think about how so many different people will use that in a completely different way from what we intend. [32:05] KL Absolutely. Okay, so in August last year—about a month before the book was due to launch on September 26th—you excitedly tweeted that you wrote a book and rightly so. That tweet sort of became famous though, and I remember getting your first Slack message about it. Can you share a little bit about what happened? LK Yeah, so I think this was even the second tweet I’d written about it because I was so eager to make sure that no one had missed my first tweet because when I was writing the book, we kept quite quiet about it—I talked with my friends and family about it, but it’s not something you announce before it’s done, lest it never get finished. [KL laughs] And so I wrote this tweet saying “if you’ve missed it, I’ve written a book. It’s coming out very soon, sign up to get it first.” And so a couple of links—a link to the A Book Apart page and then a link to my website. I don’t think it was even right away, but maybe a few hours later I got this reply from a very well-known designer saying, “Actually you wrote a text. It took a few other people and skills to make that into a book.” And I was absolutely mortified, and it was late at night and I’m not a late-night person really, but I saw this quite late at night and I completely froze inside my gut because I was really worried that what I’d written had implied somehow that I wasn’t being grateful to the people that had helped [laughs] me with this book, [KL laughs] that had actually made the book exist. Like you, Katel, and just everyone else involved because it is a very small independent publisher. There’s a lot of people who put their bit of love into it. And I just felt horrible and thought that I was suggesting that I was ungrateful, but then only in the back of my mind when I was—if I looked at it from a detached perspective, of course, this guy wasn’t being very nice. [laughs] And fortunately a few people started to point that out and kind of speak up for me and say “hey, you know, when you start a message and you’re correcting a woman and it says actually and you tell her something that she already knows, you might be doing something called mansplaining [laughs & KL laughs] and it got to the point where this started getting picked up by a lot of people. I don’t even know how JK Rowling or “Rowling”—my brother says I have to make sure I pronounce her name correctly seeing as she stuck up for me—congratulated me on the book. And Roxane Gay, which I was amazed with, because I love Roxane Gay’s writing. So that was pretty cool. I was sitting there reading all these lovely people say really lovely things to me about my book, but it kind of didn’t stop the fact that it came out of a man mansplaining to me. [KL & SWB laugh] And so then, of course, there were magazines wanting to write about it. Teen Vogue and contacted me to ask me for my comments on the situation and that was a difficult one because there are a lot of people really railing on Erik who tweeted me. And I don’t like pile-ons. I don’t like it on social media when people try to bully each other by drawing a lot of attention—particularly people with a lot of followers—drawing a lot of attention in order to shame someone. I think a little bit can be healthy, a little bit of awareness. But actually, there’s a point where you’re just bullying people. I didn’t want to really be involved in that. And so I did say—sort of when I saw it was starting to get a bit much, people can we just—this is nice, this has been fun, but can we draw our attention elsewhere now because there’s a lot more to worry about in the world than a tweet about a book. [36:10] KL Yeah, I mean I do just want to say that of course, you are an extremely thoughtful person and I don’t think anyone was assuming that [laughing] all the work that went into it was, you know, disregarded in that tweet. But the truth is that you did write a book and you have every right to be excited about that and he had no right to sort of like mansplain that to you. So, I mean the negative part is that that happened, but there were these positives that came out of it—you had these badass famous authors tweeting in support and solidarity with you and and you did pick up a lot of this coverage and I know it was bittersweet. What did you do to handle that? LK I tried to have a healthy amount of perspective about what was going on. And I remember sending messages to you saying, “hey, maybe we could open pre-orders because, I mean, while people are hearing about the book…” I mean, it’s not the kind of book where someone who knows nothing about the web is going to buy it just because of a tweet that they didn’t like somewhere. It’s not that kind of thing. But if it did raise awareness for accessibility, well that’s really cool. If it meant that some people ended up learning about making their websites more accessible for people, that’s a really cool outcome. And so I tried to look at it that way. It could get a bit frustrating when people would introduce me at conferences talking about the tweet and some people said things like, “oh, you must be really grateful to him after all of this.” [KL laughs] And I just thought, well actually, you know what? I’m not because I think the book would have done fine without his attention and it doesn’t feel right being grateful to him. He wasn’t being nice and he continued to not be particularly kind to me in private messages and I just wanted it to go away at that point and I didn’t want to have that negative attention anymore. SWB I mean, you’re still being, I would say, so diplomatic about it. And so thoughtful about it and I will just say, I remember when I saw his original tweet, it was quite early on in this whole firestorm and I felt sick to my stomach with anger at him for this because I knew that it felt like he was stealing something from you—stealing this pure moment of you being able to celebrate having done something difficult and have something to show for it that you could share with people. And so, I want to talk a little bit more about how that felt for you because I know you’ve written a little bit about it, about how the feeling doesn’t go away, right? You’ve mentioned that it made you feel really small and it’s also made you feel like even afterward that you don’t want to make a big deal out of it or celebrate this book because you feel that implication of being indebted to him always coming back to you. [39:17] LK Well, that’s the thing. It’s often a lot easier to be angry and get sort of enraged by these things when it happens to somebody else. Because I’m really great at getting angry on behalf of other people. I spend the majority of my work trying to encourage other people and often by telling them off and telling them I don’t think they’re doing the right thing in order to try to get people to behave more ethically in their work. And it’s very different when you’re on the receiving end of it. And I’m a very sensitive person and I really take criticism to heart. I really listen and I really care about what people [laughs] think about me. So, when the comment first came through and I thought “oh, no, I’ve done something wrong, I’ve done something wrong.” I’d just started to be able to talk about this book. I was already quite nervous about the idea of publishing a book in the first place. I was worried that people wouldn’t think I was qualified or well-known enough or know enough about the topic to even do that in the first place. And so to suddenly have someone questioning that on Twitter very publicly— someone who has a lot of followers. And, in fact, I think he was even responding to a retweet from someone else who has even more followers. And so the idea that all of these people would sort of see my embarrassment was—oh, it made me feel horrible and I do keep going back to that feeling, I do keep kind of thinking, ugh, I call it “the book.” I call it Accessibility for Everyone. I don’t say “my book” because I don’t feel like it’s my book and I’m really worried that if I do go around saying oh “my book,” people will think, “oh there she goes thinking that she did all this work when she just wrote the text.” So it’s—I know how unreasonable it is. I really do know how unreasonable that is, but I can’t help but feel that way. SWB I think that’s one of the things I wish people who make these shitty comments or people who have given you this kind of like, “oh you should feel indebted to him” feedback. I wish that was the kind of thing they really understood was like how much this kind of stuff can erode the confidence of somebody who’s kind of gingerly setting their foot out there and saying like, “here I am I made something” and you know what? You did not deserve that and you wrote a book! You wrote a fucking book! it’s your book. That book is yours. [all laugh] KL It is. SWB And I think that that’s one of the biggest things that—it makes me sad that somebody would try to take that away from you and particularly—I think that this is something that he wouldn’t have said that if you had been a man. He just wouldn’t have it. It wouldn’t have even occurred to him. [42:21] LK No. SWB And I’m sure he doesn’t believe that. I’m sure he doesn’t think that it was a gendered comment, but it fucking was. And it’s so frustrating and I’m curious: is there anything that you have found that has helped you figure out how to celebrate this anyway? Or is there anything that helped you sort of process it and move on from it? LK Yeah. Well, I unfortunately it’s something that I feel like I have experienced with in that—so my partner, Aral, and I work together and I often find the work we do together, we will get different gendered—different responses to what we do. And people will treat him in a very different way from how they treat me when we’re often saying similar things in similar ways. And it can be so frustrating and feel very unfair. And what I try to do is I try to see the victories in reaching the people I really want to reach. Like when I’m giving a talk and I have a man come up to me afterwards and dismiss it as I’m apparently young and idealistic or I don’t know what I’m talking about or I haven’t been in the industry for long enough—all of which is untrue, by the way. Actually, it’s the women who come up to me afterwards and say “oh that talk was great and I loved it.” I’ll always remember this fantastic tweet this woman wrote after I gave a talk. She put the animated GIF of—oh, it was Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games—you know—when she does the gesture of like victory and everyone like looks around. And she put that up after my talk saying “yeah, this was such a great talk and you really smashed it.” And that’s what I care about. I don’t care about impressing little men. That’s not my job. I care about trying to reach the right people with the messages that I care about. I care about trying to make the web more inclusive, trying to make the web more ethical, and if people aren’t bothered about that, then I’m not bothered about them, quite honestly. SWB I love that so much. I was cheering for you, clapping so loudly in my head right now. [LK laughs] And I love that because I do think it’s so great when you know that you reach people and I know that your work absolutely reaches people. And you have a lot more people that you’re going to reach. So, we are running out of time and I’m wondering if we can—before we go—just talk more about that. What’s next for you? What are you excited about? And what do you have coming up in 2019? [45:01] LK What I’m excited about is being able to dig in and keep going with the work we’ve been doing. We’ve been doing a lot of research and a lot of work into trying to work out how do you architect ethical technology in this day and age when we have so many things to worry about? How do we try to build technology that understands things like bias and how people are discriminated against all of these systemic issues we face? How do we try to make technology that is stronger and can be flexible and not be the same old stuff that straight white men in Silicon Valley are making? How do we make things that are for everybody? And I’m really excited about being able to work on these things—being able to really dedicate time to it. I think now we’re in a place where we’re settled down where—we’ve been moving a lot over the last few years, so we finally have a place to live that feels comfortable and safe and will give us the ability to just get on with it. SWB Well, I’m so glad you’re doing that, both because of the work itself and because I know that you are such an inspiration to so many people, including me and Katel. Laura, we have loved your work for a long time and we have been so happy to have you on the show. Laura’s book, which is Accessibility for Everyone, is available from A Book Apart. And, Laura, where can listeners find out more about you? LK You can find everything about me on my website, which is laurakalbag.com. SWB Laura, thank you again for being here. LK Oh, thank you for having me. Thank you for being so kind. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out] CAREER CHAT WITH SHOPIFY SWB Time to take a quick minute to talk careers with Shopify. So, this week we have Mackenzie Bartlett, a recruitment researcher for production engineering. Mac, you see a lot of incoming applications. What is the number one thing that you recommend when folks are applying to Shopify? MB Thanks! My top tip? Do your research on the company before you apply and definitely before you interview. Shopify has a ton of videos and blog posts online and it really stands out to me when a candidate has done their research and knows a little bit about what the team is working on already. It shows me that you have an interest in what we do and the problems were solving. It’s a simple tip, but it will make your application stand out and your interview process that much better. And as an aside, make sure your cover letter is addressed to the right company. You wouldn’t believe how many applications we get that are addressed to a certain popular music streaming platform, which will remain unnamed. [47:33] SWB Oh my God, I’m not gonna lie. I made that mistake on a proposal once. So, don’t be like me, do your research, and maybe you should also talk to Mac. Check out shopify.com/careers to see all the latest job postings. [music fades in, plays for five seconds, and fades out] FUCK YEAH OF THE WEEK SWB Katel, I don’t even have to think about what my “fuck yeah” is this week because it’s Werk It! That is the women’s podcasting conference, which we went to just before Thanksgiving. KL Yes! SWB So, for all of you who aren’t podcast nerds, Werk It is put on by WNYC, which means that it is full of super legit podcasters. We got to learn from people like Manoush Zomorodi, who I’ve loved for a long time. She used to run a show called Note to Self, but now she has this new one called ZigZag, which is pretty rad. And we also heard a panel from Nora McInerny, who runs Terrible, Thanks for Asking, which I thought that panel was super refreshing and such a good show too. KL Yeah. SWB And like, these are some really big names in podcasting. KL I know! It was very cool. It was a great conference and we met some really incredible people. SWB Also, we got the hang out in New York for a few days together, which was fun. KL Yes. SWB And also—and this was an extra cool part for me—one of the things I learned is that maybe we are further along than I thought with this show. KL Oh my gosh, yes. That was so validating. SWB A lot of the stuff the presenters were talking about I felt like “oh yeah, we’re kind of already doing that” or like, “oh yeah, we’ve been working on that.” Not to say we have it all figured out, not to say that we’re going to be like raking in that Serial level fame and fortune yet. [KL laughs] But, I started feeling like, “yeah, maybe we’re not quite so kind of like fresh to this. Maybe we are—we do kind of know something now.” And we also had this mentor session, which was awesome. It made me realize that any time I’m going to an event that has mentor sessions, just sign up for them because—who knows what you get! KL Oh my gosh. That was very—a really cool thing they did. SWB Yes, and so our mentor happened to be somebody who was really well connected in podcast land. And she was so reassuring and she was even legit excited about the future of our show and how she can help us, which, I mean, I hope everything that we talked about pans out, but even if it doesn’t, it was just so great to hear from her that we’re doing okay. It was great also to be in community with all these other podcasters and especially women podcasters, right? Because so many podcasts events are so male-dominated and this allowed us to leave both feeling, I think, really excited and just like a little more confident that we’re doing alright. We’re like—fuck that, we’re doing great! [50:05] KL Yeah! Fuck that and fuck yeah to Werk It. SWB Yeah, we worked it. KL That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go. NYG is recorded in her home city of Philadelphia and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Laura Kalbag for being our guest today. If you like today’s show, please leave us a review and rate us wherever you listen to podcasts. And get even more of us in your life with I Love That—our biweekly newsletter. Sign up at noyougoshow.com. See you again next week. SWB Bye! [music fades in, plays alone for 32 seconds, and fades out]

Laura Kalbag is the author of Accessibility for Everyone and actively works for social justice in the digital age. Here, Laura discusses the intersections between UX, accessibility, and human rights.

Many companies use cookies, tracking, and behavioral ads to help them sell more things. But it also means they collect a lot of data on what we do and who we are, raising online privacy concerns. What does that mean for developers? Laura Kalbag explains how those tools work and what we as developers should think about when building our own products. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) GDPR Piwik Fast Mail Proton Mail cookies Better How Companies Use Personal Data Against People Codeland Conf Codeland 2019

#96 Ethical Data & Design with Laura Kalbag by Digital Mindfulness

This week on the show, we talk to Laura Kalbag about her new book, Accessibility for Everyone. We discuss how digital products have an increasing mandate to be broadly usable by everyone in society, and what we can do to achieve better accessibility in our designs.

Laura Kalbag is a designer from the UK. She’s one-third of Ind.ie, a tiny social enterprise working for social justice in the digital age. At Ind.ie, Laura works on a web privacy tool called Better. Her first book, Accessibility for Everyone, is published by A Book Apart.

Laura Kalbag is a designer from the UK. She’s one-third of Ind.ie, a tiny social enterprise working for social justice in the digital age. At Ind.ie, Laura works on a web privacy tool called Better. Her first book, *Accessibility for Everyone*, is published by A Book Apart.

Laura Kalbag is a designer from the UK. She's one-third of Ind.ie, a tiny social enterprise working for social justice in the digital age. At Ind.ie, Laura works on a web privacy tool called Better. Her first book, Accessibility for Everyone, is published by A Book Apart.

Laura shares her upbringing in England, and how she was introduced to web-based graphic arts, and front end development. Then we discuss the importance of web standards, accessibility and how Ind.ie hopes to combat the data mining practices of Silicon Valley.

It’s a special week this week on Unfinished Business as I’m joined by not one, but two regular co-hosts, Ashley Baxter and Laura Kalbag. In a bumper episode, we talk about cakes, brightly coloured fizzy drinks and Yorkshire pudding burgers. We discuss podcasting, sounding good as a podcast guest, then whether we allow Christmas decorations in our offices. Finally we talk about what we’ve achieved this year and what our goals are for 2015. It’s a fast and fun episode. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

I had a chat with Laura Kalbag, one of the designers at Ind.ie. If you’re interested in helping build platforms and phones which are free of corporate spyware – please donate to their crowdfunding campaign. Get About A Minute as soon as each episode goes live. Stick this Podcast Feed into your podcatcher Or you…

This week’s an emotional episode of Unfinished Business. After talking about why a burger in a donut should never, ever have become a thing, Laura Kalbag and I discuss mental health issues in our industry. We talk about my own struggles with depression and depersonalisation disorder, issues that stem from my father’s own mental health issues and suicide.

Laura Kalbag and Ashley Baxter did a wonderful job hosting Unfinished Business for the last three weeks and this week Laura hands it back to me. We talk about how we interpret the ‘business’ theme of Unfinished Business differently and how that changes the focus of the podcast. As we’re both small business owners and we’ve both been on holiday recently, we discuss how we handle keeping on top of business while we’re away from it. How we handle email and client enquiries and even work that going on while we’re away. Finally we talk about “Smartphone stress: Are you a victim of ‘always on’ culture?” If smartphones have become “tyrants in our pockets” and how being connected affects how we relax when we’re not supposed to be working.

Ashley Baxter and Laura Kalbag are back for their final takeover episode of Unfinished Business. We talk about using social media for your business and whether writing and speaking are a scalable part of your business model. We had a couple of questions from Shane Hudson and Simon MacFadyen on forcing yourself out of your comfort zone and advice to a designer just starting out. This episode is sponsored by Espresso and Native Summit. You can get a 10% discount on Espresso with the offer code unfinished. Native Summit are giving away 20 free tickers to the first 20 listeners who visit their site and use the offer code unfinished.

Ashley Baxter and Laura Kalbag are back again for this week’s episode of Unfinished Business. We talk about the common myths around working for yourself, particularly as a solo entity working from home. We have some great questions from Elliot Davis, Simon Cox, and Shane Prendergast, resulting in us talking about photo manipulation and what do we both want to achieve before we retire? This episode is sponsored by GatherContent and SimplyFixIt. You can get 20% off your subscription to GatherContent forever with the offer code unfinished. You can get 10% off any iPhone or iPad repair with SimplyFixIt plus a free upgrade from the standard warranty to three-month’s accidental cover with the offer code unfinished.

While Andy’s on holiday, Ashley Baxter and Laura Kalbag take over this week’s episode of Unfinished Business. We talk about all things business insurance, including public liability, professional indemnity, business contents and copyright infringement. And it’s not boring, honest! This episode is sponsored by Devicelab, Perch and dConstruct. Get your ticket to dConstruct for only £125+VAT (£150) when you use the offer code unfinished.

A slight change of format for this week’s Unfinished Business. Laura Kalbag wanted to know our experiences of working with our partners—she’s just started working with hers—so she emailed Sue some questions. I hadn’t heard her answers until Laura read them on the show, but I think that makes for interesting listening. I’ll publish Sue’s full answers on Stuff and Nonsense later on in the week. Thanks to our sponsors this week, they were Gather Contentand Forge. As always, you can support Unfinished Business by supporting them.

On Unfinished Business this week, and with us both fresh from the Net Awards, Laura Kalbag and I talk about our experiences there. I explain why I don’t feel at home in the web design industry as it is today and how its conversations no longer reflect my interests in design. After last week’s ‘giant’ misunderstanding about speaker fees, we also talk about the responsibilities that speakers have to themselves, to an audience and to an event and the people who’ve organised it. It’s a lively discussion. We talk about swearing, why private agreements between speakers and conferences should remain confidential and why speakers should play their part in supporting an event, before, during and after it. Laura, I and everyone who makes Unfinished Business, wants to say an enormous “thank you” to everyone who voted for our show and put it in the final five top podcasts of 2014 at the Net Awards. I also want to thank our sponsors this week. They are GatherContent and Hammer For Mac. As we always say, please support Unfinished Business by supporting them.

On this week’s Unfinished Business I’m joined by not one, but two guests to keep me out of trouble, Laura Kalbag and marathon runner Rachel Andrew. We talk about the fallout from last week’s news that publisher Five Simple Steps has closed, what this means for other niche publishers and for the authors who write for them. We talk about how the abrupt announcement of the closure could’ve been handled better and the lessons we might learn to help us in the future. Finally, we break down how advances and royalties work differently between small and large publishers and the reasons why authors might choose a publisher over self-publishing their books. Finally, everyone involved in making Unfinished Business wants to say an enormous thank-you to all of you out there in podcast land who voted for us for Podcast Of The Year at The Net Awards. You helped us make the shortlist of the final five that’s full of brilliant podcasts and put a very broad smile on all our faces. Thank-you to our sponsors this week. Get 20% off your subscription to GatherContent, forever using the offer code unfinished and 50% off for your first two months using Forge with their offer code unfinished.

On this week’s Unfinished Business, Laura Kalbag and I talk about the business of speaking at conferences, why it’s essential to be paid to speak and the importance of contracts that cover the paying of expenses, who owns the content of a talk and what conferences can do with that content after the event. This week’s amazing sponsors are the Scotch On The Rocks conference and Macrabbit’s Espresso. Get 10% off your copy of my favourite code editor using the offer code unfinished.

Laura Kalbag is back on Unfinished Business this week to talk about how far in advance we book client projects and what we you do if a client wants more work done, but we’ve other work booked for the next few months? We discuss upping our day rates and how Laura’s client suggested she charge more. No Unfinished Business would be complete without talk of pirates and smugglers and the Milton Keynes Geek Night All Dayer conference which took place last week. Thanks to our sponsors for this episode, they are Hammer For Mac and Ghostlab. You can support our show by supporting them.

For this, the fiftieth episode of Unfinished Business, I’m joined by regular guest Laura Kalbag. We talk about ethical statements and whether we, and the companies that people work for, should set out what they will and won’t work on our websites. I would like to say an enormous thank-you to Anna Debenham for helping me get started with this podcast. To all our guests and sponsors for making the show possible and to you, our listeners for being lovely people. I’d like to wish you all a very happy Christmas holiday. Special thanks to Forge, static hosting made simple, for sponsoring this week’s episode.

On this week’s Unfinished Business, regular co-host Laura Kalbag and I talked candidly about hosting workshops and whether they make commercial sense and how we make money from them. Laura asked me about choosing Stuff and Nonsense for our business name and we talked about how people can make the best, first impression when you write to us. (Sorry for Laura’s audio quality. We’ll try to do better next time.) Thanks to our sponsor, Blush, beautiful letterpress printing of cards, stationery and more for designers and artists. Support Unfinished Business by supporting them.

Back from his holidays, all tanned and gorgeous (obviously,) Andy rejoins Anna to talk about Laura Kalbag’s ‘Good Designers, Good Clients’ article on A List Apart. They discuss how Andy was inspired by Seth Godin to start speaking again and the best bits from the last three episodes including our ‘double our day rate Fridays,’ Sarah’s approach to handling low budget enquiries and the problem of doing work under NDA and having little to show for it in your portfolio. Thanks to our sponsor, Ghostlab — Synchronized cross-browser and mobile testing taken to the next level. Get 30% off at checkout with the offer code UNFINISHEDBUSINESS.

Laura Kalbag is a talented web designer and speaker hailing from Brighton.

Anna and Andy talk about their worst business mistakes and disasters, what went wrong on the worst client projects and what they learned from them. Andy also wants to know why his hotel’s housekeeping steals his soap, plus there are confessions galore about shampoo, Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. This week the show’s sponsored by Smashing Magazine’s CSS3 For Responsive Design workshop with Andy Clarke. It’s happening in Freiburg in Germany on June 25th. Save 15% off the ticket price with the offer code unfinished6. And Revolution. Revolution is a conference being held in Shrewsbury, Shropshire in the UK on Friday 27th September. Speakers include Elliot Jay Stocks, Jonathon Snook, our good friend and stand-in co-host Laura Kalbag and more. Thanks to our sponsors for making this show possible.

While Anna’s away in Amsterdam, Andy talks with designer Laura Kalbag about Star Trek Into Darkness, how they name wifi networks and whether location really affects their businesses. They discuss about how to find good sub-contractors and the differences between working for clients direct or via third-parties. This episode is sponsored by Slide + Stage — become a better presenter with this full-day, intensive masterclass with Aral Balkan. If you’re one of the first twenty people to use our special URL, you’ll get £20 off your ticket price. And by Ghostlab — ‘Synchronized cross-browser and mobile testing taken to the next level.’ If you use the offer code UNFINISHEDBUSINESS , you’ll get 30% off Ghostlab until June 15th.

While Anna is en vacance en France, Andrew’s joined by guest co-host, designer Laura Kalbag to talk about mentoring students and how to give them, and other newcomers, valuable commercial project experience. Laura also talks about how best to ask for, and deal with, client feedback while Andrew remembers Mickey, the world’s cleverest chimpanzee. This episode is sponsored by Blush, beautiful letterpress printing of cards, stationery and more for designers and artists and Beyond Tellerrand a conference and workshop event for the web community. Beyond Tellerrand is happening May 27th to the 29th in Düsseldorf in Germany. Use the offer code unfinished3 for 10% off the standard price.