Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking to Adam Rodenbeck, Senior User Experience Team Member at Salesforce, to wrap up our two-part series focused on building accessible apps. We look at his experience developing accessible apps from both the admin and the developer side of things and do a demo live on the pod of what it’s like to navigate with a screen reader. Join us as we talk about how a screen reader works and the technology behind it, Adam’s amazing journey through tech, and what you can do to bring accessibility to your users. You should  subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Adam Rodenbeck. Adam’s journey to Salesforce. “When I started my Salesforce journey, I sent an email out that said I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up until I saw this presentation from one of the accessibility specialists at Salesforce,” Adam says, “I always wanted to do something with computers that would give back to the blind community.” Adam got his start at a nonprofit, training people who had lost their sight later in life to use the computer again, but this role was an opportunity to put together everything he loves in one role. “We started using Salesforce as our system of record to store information on all the clients,” Adam says, “and it blew me away just how well it was working.” In 2009, it was rare to encounter an enterprise software program that was reasonable to navigate with a screen reader, and that helped him dive into the platform. He eventually found his way into the IT department as a developer. “I work with designers on new features on the platform,” Adam says, “that’s usually discussing what it’s going to take to make this accessible, how is the keyboard interaction going to work? What are the things that are going to be visual that might need to get called out to a person who is using a screen reader?” From there, it’s working with engineering teams to actually make that happen. The basics of screen readers and how to test for them. A screen reader has two pieces to it. For one thing, it’s actually reading the screen aloud (and you get to decide things like how the voice sounds). But the other component is a Braille display, which connects via USB or Bluetooth and represents what’s on the screen in Braille with dots that can be raised and lowered. “Because I work a lot with code, I really need to have that Braille reinforcement to read what’s on the screen at the same time that it’s being read to me,” Adam says. “If you’re an admin and you’re using the components that Salesforce put together, then accessibility should be available to you,” Adam says, “but a quick test to make sure that everything is working well is to see if you can get to the control you want by tabbing down the screen.” Sometimes it’s arrow keys, but try using the keyboard and seeing if you can get to anything a user is going to need. Having conversations to improve accessibility. “If a designer can describe something to me, how it should act or what they want to happen, and make me, as someone who is blind, understand what it is that their design does it gives us both a better understanding,” Adam says. If you can’t describe your customizations in a way that everyone can understand, you’re probably not doing it right. The key to creating something that works for your users is to have conversations with the people you want to support. Screen reader users often use the find command, so they want as much information as possible on the screen to get to what they need quickly. Screen magnifier users, on the other hand, are looking for an uncluttered display since everything is enlarged for them. Do your research, but also have the conversations with the people you are supporting. Hear how a screen reader user navigates Salesforce for yourself. In order to make things that work better for a screen reader,...

How to Build Accessible Apps with Adam Rodenbeck

The Salesforce Admins Podcast