E52 – Interview with Eric Meyer – Part 2

Eric says that accessibility "is a foundational principle of the web. Like literally the web is built on accessibility. The original specs don’t necessarily call it that, but that’s an organizing principle of the web. And to try to ignore it or overcome it is a lot like trying to paddle upstream". Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Make sure you have a look at: Their blog: https://www.twilio.com/blog Their channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/twilio Diversity event tickets: https://go.twilio.com/margaret/ Transcript Nic:    Welcome to the Accessibility Rules Podcast. This is episode 52. Oh my! 52 weeks of podcasting about accessibility.
I’m Nic Steenhout and I talk with people involved in one way or another with web accessibility. If you are interested in accessibility, hey, this show’s for you. 
To get today’s show notes or transcript, head out to https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Twilio, connect the world with the leading platform for voice, SMS and video at Twilio.com.

In this episode, I’m continuing my conversation with Eric Meyer. Last show was really awesome, we talked a lot about where we’ve been and maybe today we are going to talk a little bit more about where we are going. Hi Eric, thanks for joining me again. Eric:     Hello! Thanks for having me back. Nic:     Yeah, So- We were talking last week about--  your views of accessibility that haven't really changed in about forming new people and we were talking a little bit about achievement in terms of web accessibility. So let's flip that question and go down the path of … What have you done that you regret most in terms of web accessibility in your career? Eric:     Focus {outline: 0} in the first CSS reset. It’s far and away the biggest one. Nic:     I have to say that I routinely end up swearing at you in my own head when I do accessibility audits. And I see that and I go back to clients and they say, “Oh but but but Eric Meyer did that”. So yeah- Eric:     Did you show them the comment that I had in here [unintelligible 02:05] coz, right, so-- For those who aren’t familiar with the history, I’ll just very quickly sketch it. So I wrote this thing called a CSS Reset. The idea of which was to have all browsers be on a level playing field. By removing margins and font sizing and all that stuff. And the idea was that people would take that reset and then tune it to their own, what I think-- what I call Reboot. So normalized .css is actually an example of a reboot style sheet Nic:     Yeah Eric:     That’s a modified reset, right. So that instead of just, ”Let's make all the text look the same, like literally all the same size and weight and everything. Normalize is a reboot in that it says ok let's make things look nice. Basic but nice. And it has font faces and sizes and a background colour for the body. That’s not-- that’s what I thought people would do and it’s what I encouraged them to do with the reset was adapted but people would just take it and slap it in wholesale and then override things. So, anyway. There's a point in that original reset where I said-- so I’ve forgotten exactly, but a:link, a:visited, sorry a:focus {outline:0}, or outline: none. Now there’s a comment right next to it that says, “Remember to set a focus” Set a focus style. But what I was thinking was, well I’m clearing the decks and this needs to-- I need to clear the decks here too and then I’ll just remind people to create an outline that fits in with the design they’re creating. Well, people didn’t. Nic:     People rarely read the manual, right? They just-- Eric:     Yeah, yeah. And I made naive assumptions about how it would get used and a part of it is that the CSS- the original Rest got pasted into the top of the default Wordpress theme. And it’s persisted for, I don’t-- I’m not sure if they’ve updated to the newer reset since then bu