Facebook Developer Spotlight

Ramya Sethuraman interviewed me about my interest in accessibility, especially while building the original version of Facebook for Business. I’ve preserved it here in case the original interview URL rots into oblivion. I also fixed a few typos and updated the markup.

Developer Spotlight: Erik Vorhes (User Interface Engineer, Business Marketing Team)

Can you tell us a little bit about your work at Facebook and the recent accessibility enhancements that you released?

I work with the Business Marketing team to create materials that make it easier for businesses to find and communicate with people on Facebook who care about or are interested in what they do.

The most recent accessibility enhancement I shipped was a new version of Facebook for Business, which uses semantic HTML; is keyboard accessible; and has large, readable text. This was a pretty big undertaking — and there’s still a lot to do!

What got you interested in accessibility?

I guess the short answer is that I want to make the world a better place.

For almost as long as I can remember, my mom has worked with developmentally disabled adults in a variety of roles. She has been a model for me in how to treat others with love and respect, no matter what our differences are. Reflecting that attitude in my work matters to me; it seems to me that web accessibility is the most obvious way to be hospitable.

I’ve always imagined the internet to be this amazing non-physical space, where we can learn, interact, and do all kinds of things without the constraints or prejudgements that we face in the world. It’s not quite so simple, of course, since we actually have bodies and still need a way to access the internet. Making those intermediaries easier to use means we’re that much closer to that ideal.

You recently spoke at Web Afternoon about accessible fonts. Can you talk a bit about your presentation?

When we think about web accessibility, we tend to focus on ensuring that things work with screen readers and alternate input devices and that interactive elements are easily distinguishable for people with colorblindness.

All of those things are important, but we tend no to think much more about how we present content for people who can see. Much of the web remains text-based (or in the case of video or audio, there ought to be captions or transcripts or both). Because text is such a significant part of how we experience the web, we should treat it with care: by choosing a legible typeface and making our text readable (for example, through contrast, line-length, and spacing between lines), we make the web a better place for the people reading our stuff.

Do you have any aha moments to share with us about accessibility evangelizing?

Working with code is ultimately a binary experience, but interacting with people never is. Nothing beats observing people trying our product in real time. It is powerful to observe people using something you’ve made and to learn that part of it doesn’t work as expected or is challenging to use. That experience is doubly potent, because it exposes you to how different people do things and lets you internalize how frustrating those broken experiences can be. I’ve never seen engineers more motivated to solve something than when they really understand how their work affects the people who rely on it.

Honest-to-goodness usability testing is the best way to go about it long-term. A quicker way is to have developers try their web products with a screenreader (but there is a learning curve, for sure).

What do you do besides coding at Facebook?

I like spending time with my family, especially when we get out to explore some of the amazing state and national parks near where we live. I also love reading and playing with type. And — shameless plug! — a friend and I write a usually-weekly column on new type for Typedia.