Interview with Bob Regan, Senior PM of Accessibility, Macromedia

Bob Regan is Senior Product Manager of Accessibility at Macromedia, responsible for ensuring compliance with Accessibiliy and Disability legislation in Dreamweaver, Flash and all other Macromedia Products. DMXzone's Bruce Lawson caught up with him in London last night (Sept 4th 2003) and asked him about his job, the forthcoming MX 2004 family of products, and Gollum.

When you began the job, did you find that the development teams for products like Flash and DW were supportive, or did they need persuading of the value of accessibility in products?

In the case of Dreamweaver and Flash specifically, I found that they were not only supportive, but that they had plans in place before I arrived. In those cases my job was to facilitate the work that was already in place with some feedback and resources and then presenting those projects to the disability community. Those teams were terrific to work with because they both understood not only what was at risk, but what they each stood to gain. For other teams just starting out with accessibility, my primary role was and continues to be providing an overview of the issues and then help them carve out a strategy. I found that generally folks were sincerely excited about working on the issue, once they had a concrete sense of what to do and how it impacts their business.

How does it work in process? Do you review the builds of products in development and feedback, or do you have staffers within the dev teams looking out for accessibility?

As we release each product, we almost immediately start planning features for the next release. At this stage, we rely heavily on customer feedback to shape our development schedule for the next release. I will generally try to sit down with each of the product managers, make requests or suggestions but each team makes its own decisions. From there, myself and my team are available to the product teams to review early builds of products or to look at specific issues in the development process. My team includes the people at the National Center for Accessible Media. They are really fantastic and have had a tremendous impact on our products.  Once the product goes to beta, we make sure it is reviewed by members of the disability community and our own QA team tests it quite thoroughly.

Which was the most difficult MM product to get accessible? Why?

Good question. I guess I would have to say Flash for a couple of different reasons. First, Flash relies on a very complex API to communicate with assistive technologies known as MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility Architecture). This means it takes a long time to bring a team up to speed on the API and then test out the implementation. In terms of design, Flash represents a challenge in that it does not follow the paradigm of html. Flash is structured via parent-child relationships, not a linear hierarchy like html. Flash has an unlimited variety of controls and formats. Making Flash fit within standards written for HTML can be a challenge. Flash is more often akin to C++ or JAVA accessibility than it is HTML.

What was the biggest challenge in the MX2004 family?

With the Flash components included in this release, we spent a significant amount of time bringing a new team up to speed on MSAA, our implementation of it and then the specific use case we were trying to achieve.

What are you most pleased about in Dreamweaver MX 2004?

Definitely the integration of CSS into the design workflow. I feel like CSS has now gone mainstream. Dreamweaver not only assumes a designer will be working in CSS by default, it also does a lot to support best practices in CSS. I find this really exciting and with tremendous implications for accessibility. For end users, CSS allows them to view content in the format that best meets their needs. As CSS becomes more widely adopted as a standard, I am hopeful we will see more flexible sites that allow users this level of control over their experience. Integrating these changes into Dreamweaver is one of the best ways to accelerate this process.

You speak at lots of conferences - have you found that the readiness of the audience to accept the lunatic idea of accessibility has grown in the last couple of years? Why has acceptance grown?

Well, I think some credit goes to those on the lunatic fringe like yourself Bruce. Accessibility has garnered some degree of mainstream awareness if not acceptance for three reasons I can think of. First and foremost, policies such as Section 508 in the US, the DDA here in the UK and others have made it a requirement. With the overall tech downturn, those government contracts became quite important and thus accessibility gained some much deserved visibility.

Second, changes in the tools have raised the level of visibility of the issue. I think it is crucial that the Dreamweaver in particular has made accessibility such a core of its workflow. This does more to raise awareness than innumerable seminars can ever do. Finally, accessibility has gained acceptance by respected figures in the design community, like Bruce Lawson, Jeffery Zeldman, Eric Meyer bring the practices associated with accessibility into the mainstream of contemporary design. In his most recent book, I love Zeldman's argument about how to justify standards based design - " let the work do the selling for you". In Zeldman's case, that is a uniquely compelling argument.