#160 From Poker Dealer to Self-Taught Software Engineer with Julia Undeustch
01:08:01 Share

Think about that you have to still work at least 30 to 40 years and you only work 10 years. So you can still do everything you want just to coding. And then I started to learn how to code and I opened Free Code Camp because it's online. You can no one sees what I'm doing. And I started learning.

on HTML and CSS and JavaScript. Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast, your source for raw, unedited interviews with developers. This week, we're talking with Julia Undoich. She's a self-taught developer and accessibility specialist. She works at a massive European company making software more accessible for people with disabilities. Julia taught herself how to code in her 30s using Free Code Camp.

Support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio. Wix Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box, then extend, replace, and break boundaries with code. Learn more at wixstudio.com. Support also comes from the 11,223 kind folks

who support Free Code Camp through a monthly donation. Join these kind folks and help our mission by going to freecodecamp.org slash donate. For this week's musical intro with yours truly on the drums, guitar, bass, and keys, we're going all the way back to 1990 with Dr. Mario Fever. ♪♪♪

♪♪♪

Yulio, welcome to the Free Code Camp podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's great to have you here. And I'm excited to learn more about accessibility and your own journey into software engineering as a self-taught developer. My understanding is, how much money did you spend learning the code? Zero. Zero. Nothing. Nada. None. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and that is totally the way to do it. In my humble opinion, I spent $0. I spent money traveling to different tech events and things like that, but I did not spend money on books or courses or anything like that. I just use the open learning resources. I made use of my public library. I made use of the web. I made use of, uh, just publicly available events. Uh, like, did you go to like a lot of tech meetups and things like that and meet people that way?

Actually, I didn't. I was too nervous about it. I thought that I have no value for others, what I should ever talk about. I started out to code, so I never went while I was learning how to code. Yeah. So would you describe yourself as more of a quote-unquote introverted person? I mean, actually, it depends on the topic.

If I feel comfortable in the topic, then I would not say that I'm introverted. I'm very much talkable. But if I think I do not can add so much value, I'm not very comfortable with this topic, then maybe I'm very introverted.

Yeah, and I think being shy when you don't have expertise and you're trying – like I worked as a school director. I was comfortable leading a staff and talking to students and doing all those things. But you put me on a stage talking about HTML or something like that, which one of my first things that I did was gave a presentation on HTML5 and a lot of the new features that were coming with it. And I felt extremely out of my element and extremely vulnerable. Yep.

Yeah, so I can see why you wouldn't want to necessarily put yourself in that situation. Well, let's talk about accessibility. Just like for people who don't know what accessibility is, what is the simplest way to describe to somebody what accessibility is and why it's important? I would describe accessibility as something that

A way most of the people can join public places or can use the website. Yeah, providing a website in a way that everyone can use.

Okay, so for example, people who are blind, which is approximately 40 million people on earth cannot see. Yes, that's a lot. Yes, and these people need to get things done too. Exactly. And they can't. They can absolutely use the web if you –

If you quote it correctly, yes, totally. If you have to go back, I think almost or not only 20 years ago when they have to rely on other people to read a newspaper, something which is for people who can see a common thing to do.

reading the newspaper and with accessible content, they can now read everything on their own when it's written in an accessible code. Yeah. We can make the life way easier, not only for the blind people, also for the people who would need to help them otherwise. So families or neighbors, you know,

Yeah. And it's not that much work is the thing. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And a lot of people just take this for granted. Like Domino's pizza famously, uh, got sued by a blind gentleman who just wanted to order a pizza and couldn't. And Domino's rather than just going in and spending a few, maybe a few hundred developer hours to make their website like fully accessible. Uh, they, they fought it in court and they lost, uh,

And they looked like total douchebags. Yeah, okay. This is crazy, but I love the guy who has with them.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it was like kudos. I mean that is a triumph of the legal system forcing these companies to acknowledge that like, hey, I don't know. In the US we have this thing called the Americans with Disabilities Act. And my understanding is Europe is in the process of passing something similar. Yes, the European Accessibility Act coming in this year in July. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, one of the things I want to talk about with disability is a lot of people might be like, well, I'm just learning to code and I don't necessarily have time to learn all these things. Shouldn't I be learning other things?

that are more important. And I would argue, yes, like you should probably learn like more fundamental basic stuff first, but you should make time to learn accessibility. And it is a big part of the free code camp curriculum. If you were to say it, it's the basic stuff. I think the most important thing for accessibility is writing semantic HTML and HTML is the basic stuff for every front end developer. So you are just learning.

HTML, actually. Yeah. Most likely. So I do not know what the big deal is that people cannot learn HTML correctly. Yeah. I mean, it's essentially properly using HTML instead of just using divs for everything. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. And one of the points that you have made and a lot of accessibility advocates and software engineers in the accessibility space have made is

By making things more accessible, you're also just making them more convenient for able people who don't suffer from any disability, don't live with any disabilities. Yes. My current situation is when I go by public train or something, I always watch videos and I cannot even –

Watch a video without subtitles anymore. And this is something first in the beginning, it was for people who cannot hear. But actually now I think it's very convenient for me as well. I do never watch videos without subtitles anymore. I cannot do it.

Yeah. And if you're a non-native English speaker and you're watching an English language video, like my wife has studied English extensively. She's basically native level and has worked as an accountant in the United States with her English ability. But she still likes to watch movies with subtitles just because – just to make sure she gets all the information. So there's this expression like good accessibility is just good usability. Yeah. Yeah.

That's correct. Can you go into a little bit more about why you believe that's correct? Well, I think that if it's not accessible, it's not usable. This would be the first point. You cannot say that something has a good user experience when half of the people cannot even use it.

Yeah. So it has to become accessible for us. It also does not mean that only because it is accessible that it is usable or it has a good user experience. You have to improve both. Yeah. And one example of this that I've seen is like if you think about like

uh, making physical spaces accessible to people who only have access to one arm, right? Yep. There are people that are just born with only one arm and, their lives are,

different obviously because they don't have the benefit of being able to use both arms. I mean, it's a huge deal if you just like practice. Like I do these kinds of experiments sometimes like, okay, what if I only had one arm? Like how would I, you know, wash my hair? How would I do all these different things? Right. Uh, and, and one thing to think about is there are lots of people who temporarily only have, yes, exactly. That could be that maybe they're one of their arms is in a cast or,

That could mean that maybe they're holding a baby and they only have access to one arm. So by designing your spaces to be accessible to somebody who only has one arm, you're kind of also making it easier for people who are temporarily just encumbered or one of their arms is like out of commission temporarily. Yeah, totally.

And I think similarly for like, like I have visual issues, like I can barely even see in one of my eyes. Uh, so I, I like really blow up the text in my browser. So that, that has been like a huge deal for me is just being able to like read things because like it used to be, I go to the bookstore or the library and like the print would be really small and it'd just be really uncomfortable for me to try to read. And I'd really strain my eyes. Uh, but with,

viewing things on a web versus backlit and I can see everything really clearly. And I can do like super high contrast, like black on white. Like if you look at free code design, extreme high contrast. Yeah. And things like that. And then like just making, you know, pages simple enough that you can like hit command plus, plus, plus, and, and, uh, make it pretty big and it still is readable and stuff like that. And a lot of, a lot of products are really good about that. Uh, same thing on like on, uh, my, my iPhone, you can like blow up the text, uh,

And some apps you can tell that they didn't really think about that and stuff will start to wrap and break and stuff like that. But anyway, I could talk about my own accessibility considerations and things like that, but I'm just really excited that people take accessibility seriously and that there are people like you out there who are not only thinking about these things but helping companies make their websites more accessible. So you work at this giant –

like a consultancy almost like yes it's a consultancy like 100,000 plus people yes it's a very large European company called Atos it's based in France and I'm here in the Austrian headquarters

as an accessibility specialist and consult different companies or also for our internal applications or website doing the accessibility part. Yeah. So you work with lots of different companies. What would a typical day as an accessibility engineer consultant look like for you? Yeah, depending on the project I'm currently in.

It could be like helping a developer gain more knowledge about accessibility. Like there's an existing project. I would consult them. You can improve this component or that website by doing this and that, helping how to get more into accessibility. We are also trying to find stuff how to learn more about accessibility. Sometimes I'm always working on the design process already when the app is totally new. So we can assure that accessibility is already implemented from the very beginning.

Also, sometimes, but not that much until now, is also giving small talks for developer teams to learn more about accessibility. When I know it's an React project that I can tell them about the specific parts about accessibility in React applications. Yeah, this is quite it.

Okay, so it sounds like a lot of your job involves implementing solutions but also educating people as to how they can – Yes, yes. Teaching the proverbial man to fish so you don't have to give them a fish every day. I love teaching and I always hope that when I write a ticket and say this has to be like this, that in the next time they implement a component like this, they understand and do it on their own.

Not happens that often, but maybe in the future they get it and yeah. Yeah. Well, it sounds like really important, impactful work. And I want to like go back to how you got into this field. Because my understanding is you have no formal training in software development. Like you didn't go to university for this. Like maybe you can walk us through. Did you grow up in Austria? Yes. Yeah.

I grew up in Austria on a countryside. There was nothing there. Then I went to the big city in Vienna. I'm living there for 16 years and...

When I started to study at the university, musicology first and then Japanese studies, I was working as a poker dealer in a casino, which was very convenient because of the time, could work at night and on the weekends and study. But after graduating in 2020, I thought, what should I do now? And this is when I started to learn how to code.

Yes. And while I was learning how to code and Google some stuff for how can I make this working or how to implement it in a right way, then there was always a solution on Stack Overflow, for example, that you can write it like this, but if you want to make it more accessible, write it like that. And this was when I realized, okay, what is this when you want to make it more accessible? This is accessibility stuff. And for me, it was very clear from the early stage that this is also... It also means...

good code quality and this was I wanted to write the best code out there so it was for me a given to write it in an accessible way even if I did not understand very well how much impact it already it will have also for people with disabilities it was more like oh it's the best code it's out there so just write it like this yeah so it was just kind of like a side note like okay this is beneficial for people but this is the proper way to do things that's the main reason you were initially interested in just doing it that way

I want to talk about your lifestyle. In Austria, you went to university. You said you studied musicology, the study of music, and then you studied Japanese. And of course, you've got a Japanese connection in the sense that you go there regularly. And it sounds very exciting. I also go to Japan almost every year. I like to go there and just hang out and eat some really good food.

It's not that expensive to go there right now if anybody is listening and wants to go to Japan. The currency exchange rate is incredibly favorable for people coming from the United States and maybe from euros as well. Only go with one bag and come back with three. Awesome. Yeah. So I want to put us back into that lifestyle of you're going to college and you're working as a poker dealer, which –

I don't know what that's like. I did see the movie Croupier, I think is what it's called. It's got Clive Owen and it's like a 1990s movie and he's like working in casinos and stuff like that. It's a pretty cool movie. Very edgy. But what was it like? Was it like that? What was it like dealing poker? Was it...

I would say from the perspective of someone who goes into the casino and just playing, it's very different from when you're really working there. It's like a job, like every other job. You have your colleagues and you just do what you do. But especially when it's just a daily event we had for the people who come regularly. But on the weekends we had...

events with a larger buy-in and then it got more interesting. So other people were coming and especially when we had big events, I think twice a year where people from all over the world were coming to us and play poker. So from America and the buy-in was 5,000 or even 10,000 and it was like amazing. And I was always also one of the three people who were allowed to go to the live stream table.

Yeah, this was really cool. So you were on stream like standing there while people were wagering huge amounts of money. Yes. It was nerve-wracking but very interesting. What is the biggest misconception people might have about what it's like working in a casino? Yeah.

I think the misconception is I can only refer to poker because I also do only, I'm only interested in poker. And I also think the misconception about poker is that it's a luck, game of luck, or what is this called in English? But it's very, it's a sport. Yeah, it's a thinking sport like check and this and that.

This is really very interesting for me, how people can be that concentrated for 12 hours a day and when an event is like five days in a row until only one player is left. It's very nerve-wracking and you have to concentrate very deeply and...

This is something that other people estimate. It's always like telling my mom. So like my boyfriend is a professional poker player and telling my mom for the first time, my boyfriend is a poker player, it's like, oh no, he spends his money and he will lose everything and something. Yeah, okay. Yeah, my understanding is it's much harder to be a professional now because the level of sophistication and like...

Definitely. I talked with Kylie Ying, software engineer over at Google, who's also on the Free Code Camp team, and she talked about...

how there's like a perfect play or something like that. Like, like essentially like if you understand all the probabilities and stuff, you can play like perfectly, but then there's still a lot of variance and risk and reward and hidden information. So again, I, I don't personally gamble and I don't want to encourage anybody to gamble or anything like that, but I do want to acknowledge that poker is a pretty deep game and it's a game of skill as opposed to a game of chance where you're just like rolling the dice or some random outcome is determining the winner. Um,

And the way you can tell whether it's a game of chance versus a game of skill is can you intentionally lose? If you cannot intentionally lose that game, then it is most likely a game of chance. And the easier it is to intentionally lose, the more skill intensive it is. With poker, you just keep folding every single hand or you bet everything on a terrible hand and then you can immediately lose. Right? So...

Yep. But of course the other stuff was in casino like the slot machines or blackjack and stuff. I never worked in this area and I do not like it at all. And this was very sad to see people who spend all their money to think now it's turning red or it's black or something. I did not like that part. Well, how do you feel about it now? Because you're pretty removed from that world now. You're working at this big tech company or big consulting company like doing work that –

It sounds like it's very self-actualizing. It's hard to imagine a job that would be a lot more exciting and make you feel better about yourself than going out and making the web more accessible for people. So do you generally feel pretty good about yourself and your work? Yes, I do.

Okay, and let's contrast that with working in a casino where, yes, you can respect poker as a game and a skill-intensive game, but you are surrounded by people that are losing their life savings on slot machines that are stuck in the Skinner box and are just being taken advantage of by these kind of mechanisms. Yes, this was not...

Nice. So I always stayed on the poker side and did the events. Then the people only lose one time their $3,000 and then they went this gun instead of putting more money inside of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, did you, uh, did you feel any urgency to get out of that lifestyle of being a poker, uh, deal? Like what inspires you to, to,

embark upon the very arduous task of learning to code and teaching yourself this, just using free resources like FreeCodeCamp? Yeah. So the reason I left the casino scene behind me was actually my first trip to Japan.

And with the jet lag I had and I wake up at five in the morning and then I see the sun rise and it was the most beautiful thing ever. I thought I'm never going back to the casino work in the night. Never, ever again. And then I quit after coming back. So you just didn't like the nocturnal lifestyle of missing sunrises. I did not want to do it anymore. Yeah.

And then I had to figure out something. I think this was in 2017. I had to figure out what can I do with my life. And also it was a question about, since my boyfriend is a poker dealer, what lifestyle, a poker player, sorry, what lifestyle would fit into his life because he has, he can do whatever he wants when he wants.

Um, and I have to work maybe five to nine and have to ask for, can I go on vacation and stuff like this? This was in the casino. It was very good. We could always spend our time together or go on vacation whenever we wanted. But of course a nine to five job is not that easy. Um, and, and actually, I mean, it wasn't my thing.

in my beginning of 30s, and I never thought about coding in a sense that I could do it. It was like, of course, I always find coding cool. I always loved things about robots or tech in...

anime and stuff. I've always thought it's cool when I see the movies, like how can people be so smart and program this, but not me. I mean, I'm old and I'm a woman, never ever. But my younger brother, he's 10 years younger than me. And he said, Julia, or sorry, Julia, please think about that you have to still work at least 30 to 40 years.

And you only work 10 years, so you can still do everything you want, just coding. And then I started to learn how to code. This time, I worked for one year as an assistant in a law firm, and this was super boring. I hated it so much. I knew I could never go back as an assistant just doing this work.

printing and weird stuff. And luckily I had time and then I opened FreeCodeCamp because it's online. No one sees what I'm doing. And I started on HTML and CSS and JavaScript. And this was my first coding experience at all while I'm still working. And then with COVID, I lost this job and I also graduated from Japanese studies and then I'm

did it for real and learned coding in a deeper sense. Yeah. So you really doubled down to use a casino terminology. You really doubled down on learning to code once you saw that avenue. You didn't even like the job of being an assistant at a legal law firm, which for me just sounds like the very definition of kind of like mediocre office job. Yes. Totally. Totally.

Yeah. So it was like you doubled down on learning and you really went into overdrive. And then maybe you could talk about like what it was like kind of emerging from COVID and like how you got your first opportunity in software development. Yes. In Austria, we have the system that when you do not have a job, you have to, in order to get money from the state, you also have to apply at least one time per week.

for any position. So they don't mind, but you have to make sure, they have to make sure that I'm actively looking for a job. So in order to get money until I'm looking for this job. And I was coding, I think every day from Monday to Sunday, five to six hours.

I also, I first started with Java, but it was too difficult for me. I would have taken too long to get into it. So I went back to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And with this job applying, I already had many chances to practice for interviews because I don't know why, but people got very interested in me because of this poker dealer stuff and also the Japanese study stuff.

So they always wanted to know me. And, um, but of course I didn't never, I wanted this job because I don't never go back to an assistant. Yeah. But this was very good practice for me. So I was not nervous at all after one year when I really started to look for a developer job. It was like, I practice like every week. Um, and, um,

I found this program, it was called the Collab Lab. They were open until this year and they helped under presented groups, most likely women or people from Africa or gender.

underrepresented group to get into tech. And they had this, the program was more about you have to know a little bit of React to work on the project for eight weeks in a small group and you have to apply for it. And I applied two times. The first time I was not very tech savvy, so they did not choose me, but they encouraged me to apply again the next cohort.

And this is also why I focused on React because they wanted a React developer and the whole project to be on React.

And in January 2021, I got accepted. And then I started, since I'm a European citizen, I worked with the African-European team. This was also very interesting. Also, later on in the interviews, they always ask, how could you work with the African team? How was the cultural differences and stuff? This was, I think, also very interesting for other companies when I applied for jobs.

And I could talk much about this program. So working on a React application, working also with Git and GitHub, and also working on a team. It was remote. It was pair programming. There were many words they already liked about how could I talk about it in interviews. And even so that because of COVID, because we're bored here in Austria, because everything was closed or you have to, cannot go anywhere. And we went for two months alone.

trip, road trip to America from June, in May and June. And I even, so I bought an extra for this trip. I bought my MacBook and to learn how to code every day on the road. I didn't care because it was so important for me to get job after coming back. I don't have time for a break. Well, I'm on a break already for not working. And after coming back in July, I started to apply for real. And I think I had seven,

Seven applications and five interviews and two second rounds and one company took me. It was Atos and I'm there since then.

Wow. I mean, you cover so much. Let me recap some of this. So first of all, Colab Lab, very cool kind of alliterative sounding name. Unfortunately, they've closed, but they were like some sort of charity program or government initiative to help people learn to code. So this was not a paid program. This was free. And there are programs like this that you can find that are still operational. Colab Lab, unfortunately, is defunct.

But they were helping underrepresented people in software engineering, such as women, such as recent migrants from Africa. And I know tons of people from Africa who are living abroad in the UK, in Germany, and I suppose there are quite a few in Austria as well.

So you got to work on teams with some of these people, and you learned a lot about cross-cultural communication, which you probably already knew a lot about from Japan and, of course, from going to the United States, which is very different from Austria, my understanding is. Yeah.

I've talked with lots of people from Austria and the Frico camp community and it's just like a different world. And like, I think people take for granted like, Oh, it's pretty much like the United States, but it's not. There are a lot of cultural differences, right?

So because of your cross-cultural communication collaboration skills, because you've learned some Japanese, which is one of the hardest languages on earth to learn, one of the hardest natural languages. Java is also a very hard language, but it's a programming language. And then because of these things and because of your tireless effort,

to learn to code. I love the idea of you just road tripping around, you know, when like,

I guess everything in Europe was closed down due to COVID restrictions. But in the United States, we were pretty loosey-goosey with COVID. I stayed home for like two years. I just did not want to get it before I got vaccinated. And thankfully, neither me nor any of my kids or anything, like never – I eventually had it, but I had already been probably vaccinated and boosted and stuff before I got it. So it wasn't a big deal at all. It was just like, I'm out of control. I got vaccinated in the U.S. because it was way easier to get vaccinated there than in Austria. Yeah.

Well, that's good. We definitely made it a priority to rush the vaccine out and get it in as many people as possible. But you were able to kind of like take advantage of probably relatively inexpensive airfare and stuff like that and just do a big road trip and learn to code. It's like Jack Kerouac on the road, except instead of trying to write a novel, you're trying to just like, you know, write a bunch of JavaScript. Yeah, it was an amazing time. Yeah.

But now I'm here. Love it. Yeah. And you're a one-company woman. You're staying at Atos, which you've been there for a few years now. Yes. It's three and a half years. Nice. And my humble advice to people is stay at your first roll as long as you can. Just to get experience, there's this saying, a rolling stone gathers no moss.

And a lot of people say that like it's a good thing, but no, it's not a good thing. You want to be the mossy rock that has character, not the bear rock that is just tumbling down and not really accumulating anything. And I think if you stick with the team, especially like it sounds like a really perfect first role because you get to work with lots of different teams and you're in this big organization and you're getting to work with like a lot of clients and you're getting to work on a lot of different types of projects, I would imagine. Yeah.

Yeah. So would you encourage people to apply to like large consultancy type, like here in the U S of course, we've got like the big four accounting firms and then we've got like all these big banks and, and like, um,

I mean like Boston Consulting Group and what's the other one? Like there are lots of companies, McKinsey I guess, like consultancy type companies. And most of those are like management consultancy, but there are software development consultancy as well. There's like the Pivotal Labs. There's this.labs. There's ThoughtWorks, I think. ThoughtBot. Like a lot of consultancies with the word thought in their name. Like –

Do you think that that's been a positive experience as opposed to just going and working on a single code base? Well, I think it always depends on the project, on the team. Since I joined, I joined as an application developer, and now my position is an accessibility specialist. But the projects are very different, and also when working at a consultancy, it also not necessarily means that I work with my colleagues directly,

So when there's a project, when there's a company in Austria who wants to have an application, then they took from different companies the best people they get, like front-end developers from Atos and maybe the project manager from Accenture and stuff like this. So my first project was about seven months. I only worked with Accenture people.

So these were not my colleagues. I mean, these were my colleagues in this project, but then there's also already the cultural differences between Atos and Accenture, how they would love the project to be, the implementations and what they focus on, for example. So

But this was also my first accessibility project. So it was quite good for me as an experience. I was the only front-end developer, which was weird because I was a self-taught developer with no experience and I was the only front-end developer. And they said, yeah, what would you suggest? And this was for me like, I mean, I can suggest something, but I don't know in the end because it's my first project. This was a huge project. It was one of the largest projects in Austria.

But I think it also gave me the confidence afterwards that they had to rely on my opinions because there was no one else there. So you were kind of thrust into expertise. Yes. You had to kind of fake it until you made it because you had no choice. You had this giant project that had to be done. You had to make decisions. Whether you're making a right decision or a wrong decision, you have to decide, right? You can't just punt. This was crazy, but I think it was good for me in the end. In the end, yeah. Yeah.

what do you remember what it was like those first few weeks of working as a developer? And, uh, like, do you remember what your day to day felt like? Like,

Were you sleeping? Were you eating? I mean, in the beginning, I was very nervous. I also had to go to the office, which I think about one week after that, I never went there again, ever again. Oh, really? So I'm at home every day. And I also cannot imagine going back to the office, even though it's very near to me. I was more of a pro in the learning phase. So my boss back then was very...

chilled and he said program a little bit of this or learn a bit of I think I had to learn Angular in the beginning and I never used it after the two months of learning gladly um this was it was very chilled I would say and after that I joined the project and this was it for me yeah well what

I mean, you mentioned that Angular, like you had to learn it, but you never really used it. Like there's been a lot of talk about the tools kind of solidifying for front end development. There was this long, people used to be like, Oh, this was like every week there's a new library. What do I learn? And stuff like that. But it seems like people have just been focused on react and maybe some frameworks like next JS and things like that. Like, like that it's kind of like semi solved and you hear less discussion about the merits of, you know, um,

backbone versus, you know, uh, I'm trying to think of all the different frameworks that came out over, over the years, um, that were, that are, I guess, arguably doing similar things. You and direct. These are the three I learned about. Okay. Like, like if you were to learn front end development, knowing what you know today, what would you focus your skills on? Like, like what would you focus your time on?

I would, I mean, I would say only focusing on JavaScript itself to understand the logic. I never focused on JavaScript that much. It was very soon just React and writing these components and a few functionality, but not that deep into JavaScript. And this is, I think, a bad thing. I could be more skilled if I had focused more on JavaScript, but

And I would only use JavaScript as a thinking process because you can, if you understand the logic, then you can use every language, I guess. Yeah. And how do you keep your skills current? Like, do you actively learn new skills?

And it always depends on also on the project. My latest project, I'm on it on the team for three months and they wanted someone who knows WordPress and PHP and also accessibility.

And I thought PHP was dead, stupidly. Of course, PHP is not dead. But yeah, I never worked with PHP or anything like this. But I had my interview with them. So even though I'm in a big company already, I always have to apply for a specific project. So they just do not simply take me because I'm at Atos. They have to apply for the project every time. And I applied for it. And they asked me a few functional questions.

And which I could solve, but I could, I told them I'd never wrote anything in PHP. And, but they, they liked me and they said, if I could, if they gave me one month and I would learn, um, the basic stuff of PHP, if I would love to do this and invest my time in it and then to join the team. And I thought, of course, because I love to make the whole website more accessible. And this was pretty much on the artos.net website, um,

And they gave me the time to learn it, and I did. And now I joined it, and I wrote my first PHP functions and stuff. And, yeah, I love it. So this is the latest thing I learned. So a lot of it's necessitated by your employers, like, hey, can you learn this? And you just kind of follow what they want you to do. Yes, absolutely.

Stuff like this. But also I think what people often tell me when I have an interview is that they see my passion of learning. So I would say that they would not give everyone the time for one month to learn something when they're like, yeah, I don't care. Yeah, I just do it if you say so. But it's like, I love talking about accessibility and I always find it so cool when they show me something that, oh, I didn't know about this. And I'm very talky about code. When it's about code, I love it.

And if people, yeah, well, your passion for accessibility is, uh, really like it really comes through in your writing. Uh, and I read a lot of your writing in preparation for this interview. And I understand you also give a lot of talks about accessibility, uh,

Yeah. Maybe, maybe you could like, what are some of the topics that you've talked about, uh, when you travel abroad or when you go to these conferences and, uh, you're trying to get other people passionate about accessibility. Like, can you give us a rundown of, of some of your, uh, talks that you've given? Yep. Um, my first talks ever, especially for in person talks, um, was about how to get started in making WebEx more accessible, um,

And it was actually in Japan last year in 2024.

This was also about over the GDG program, so the Google Developer Groups program. I applied for it and they accepted me and then I drove. I flew to Japan, of course, and to the Google headquarters. And yes, this was my first talk ever in person for more than 100 people. It was in English, of course. It was in English. People in Tokyo.

I can't understand English. This was the most amazing thing I've ever experienced. And I also can say that the people in Japan are also very different than in Europe. Giving a talk about accessibility in Japan was so much a better experience. Maybe you can compare and contrast. You've given talks in Austria? Yeah. I had three talks in Japan.

And after coming back, I had my first in-person talk in July. It was in the, um, we are developers world Congress in Berlin. Um, they were also very engaging. It was a workshop about accessibility. I did it together with a friend of mine, Laura, and we talked about, she's an UX researcher and she's very much into, um, people with visual disabilities. So we called it, um, how people navigate the world off and on and offline, um,

And this was a very good...

How is it called? Putting next to each other. How blind people, what do they need? For example, they need... We'll call it a juxtaposition. Okay. What do they need? For example, like the white cane or they have the guide dog. And what would this mean? And they need it for navigating like the pedestrian street and crossing the street. And how is this compared to the web?

how can we make it when we create the sound for the pedestrian street to walk safely over the crosswalk? How can we do it also for the web? Like how the DOM has to look like or with the screen reader, how to compare these things. I think the workshop was really good and very much appreciated by the people. They were very interested in this. And also, I think this is,

What I'm trying to do also together with Laura to make them realize it's not just now we're in the web and this is the screen reader because people do not get it. So it's very good to have this comparison to think of a blind people in the real world, what they need and how, why should it be different? They also need different things in the web as well. Yeah.

Yeah, and in terms of specifically how your audience in Japan was different from your audience in Berlin, like Tokyo and Berlin, two very different cultures. Maybe you can just give us kind of like a feel for the experience there.

in Tokyo giving a talk versus in Berlin? I would say that maybe not even in Europe or in Berlin itself. I was also two months later at the UXCon in Vienna, but maybe the West, like also the US, that people get already annoyed about this topic of accessibility, like, oh, not accessibility talk. Oh, who cares about accessibility? Yeah, it's like, eat your vegetables. Oh,

Wow, accessibility, it's so interesting and it's so new. Maybe it's totally new for them, but there was a long line for questions only for me. And it was like, okay, I would love to also eat the yummy cookies I can see there, but I had no time to eat or drink at all because they had so many questions about it. And also after the Tokyo one, I gave two other sessions, one in Japanese and another one in English. It was the same topic.

And everyone was very interested and surprised about this topic in general. And in U.S., you've given talks in the U.S., like people just generally disinterested. All right, get to the point. Yeah, totally. I could be doing lots of things. Time is money. Americans famously preoccupied with just –

You know, figuring out like what the highest value thing they can be doing for the time. They're like productivity obsessed. Right. Yeah. But in Japan, like if I can, you know, speak as a non-Japanese, like using cultural stereotypes, they really do care about the process. I mean, like the whole Kaizen, like manufacturing from Toyota that revolutionized U.S. auto manufacturing was basically just paying attention to details and caring at the end of the day. Yeah.

Right, with the caricature of the US slapping cars on, good enough, let's get it out the door. Yeah, this was very interesting for me. Also, in Tokyo, I had... The other two sessions were about Chennai and something about Flutter, I think. And...

I thought this is the most interesting part. People want to know what's going on in AI and stuff. And then the deferral of the Google headquarters there came to me and said, I'm only here because of you. And I thought, what? Really? Because of my accessibility talk, no one actually cares in Europe or the US. I loved it. It was great. Yeah.

Well, that's awesome. And one thing I'll say about Japan is like a lot of countries, it's an aging population and more and more people are going to have issues with vision. And

Uh, like you, you said that, uh, one of the things you, you told me is that like, you like to play Pokemon red on your game boy, but there's a lot of, you know, motion blur and stuff like that. Like, can you talk about how, as people get older, accessibility becomes more like, uh,

you know, important in the sense that like, you know, when you're 20 years old, you might have like 2020 vision, but as you get older, you're going to get, uh, presbyopia. Uh, and you're, you're, you're going to have like more limited, uh, near vision and you're going to have to wear reading glasses potentially and other things.

Potential things that can kick in. Totally. I think people do not think about it that we all grow older and disabilities. So most people with disabilities are in their 60s and later on. And we should think about, even if you don't care about your neighbor who have a disability, you should care about your future self. And this is what I also realized with, as you mentioned, Pokemon. So I'm a Pokemon player since the very beginning. I played every single game.

But now with the Switch and with the open world, I cannot play any open world games. So I get motion sickness in the next five minutes. I cannot look at it. And it's sad because I want to play poker. Is there a way that these games could be changed where you don't get motion sickness? Like where you could have kind of like an open world experience? Like are there like...

I think there are games that you could... I think Nintendo in general is very bad when it comes to accessibility, first of all. You have a few system settings where you can remove many of these that you have to turn around. The camera movement, for example, is not that so specific, but...

Yeah, a bit limited, to limit it down, the hard movements, but not that good. I would say it would be possible to maybe make it better.

So the best games for me would be like just going up like this. I don't have to move around like this. Have you always had like motion sickness from games or was there a period in your life where it wasn't that big of a deal? I had always this problem. I realized it with ego shooter games. I never played them because I could not look at them. And also when my – I mentioned it already. I have a younger brother.

He's 10 years younger than me and he started playing Minecraft, I don't know, 10 years ago. So when he was 15 and he built something very beautiful and, look at this, looks cool. And I said, it looks cool. And walk me through the world and I could not. It was really, it was, oh my God, I cannot look at it anymore. It was so terrible. We had many plans. What else we could create. And I bought it before. I thought, okay, I buy it as well. And I buy Minecraft and then, oh, I cannot play it. That's a problem. Yeah.

Yeah. Are there any, like, do you think there will be, like, some sort of software innovation or some different, like, approach that, do you think that, like, how many people suffer from motion sickness like you experience from watching, like, you know, kind of 3D camera type effects? I personally do not know anyone suffers from it, so I don't know about it. But when it comes to video games, I think many people with blindness have problems.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so there's definitely a niche market if you're a game developer and you're listening to this to just make your game more accessible to blind people and then tell blind people that. Like Free Code Camp, tons of blind people use Free Code Camp and more moderately visually impaired people or people who have other disabilities.

needs. Like we've made a huge priority for this. Like there was a gentleman who does this like accessibility benchmarking for different charity websites and

And Free Code Camp was actually number three out of like the 160 plus websites he benchmarked. Like we were way above Wikipedia and a lot of other very well-funded charities and stuff like that. And we're very proud of that. We actually outranked a lot of like disability focused websites. So yeah. Yeah.

But this is something that we're very serious about. And so what advice would you give to somebody if they just – I think you mentioned semantic HTML. Just learn semantic HTML. Yeah. But what are some other things that people can consider learning that will give them the power to tap into the –

Like it's literally like a billion people on earth that have some form of disability or another. It's, it's a huge proportion of the population. And as Yulia said, like, as you get older, you're just going to start experiencing these things more and more. And, uh, you know, whether that's through injury, whether that's through genetics or

You know, you have a genetic disposition to motion sickness, for example, Yulia. I have, you know, as I said, like amblyopia and my brain just can't process signal from one of my eyes. So, you know, what are some...

things that people can do that are relatively easy to do, easy wins to make their web applications more accessible. And I will mention, by the way, if you're a mobile developer, I think that most of the mobile app development tool chains, whether that's Flutter, whether that's Swift, whatever you're using to build your mobile apps, they will have accessibility-oriented components that you can incorporate and tools. Yep.

You just need to use them, right? Yep. I think the Android Studio and also the Swift, they have the documentation about how to implement the accessibility and also the differences. So many things do not work that well in Android than in iOS. This is also the reason why most blind people have iOS phones because they are more accessible by Apple. But everyone provides accessibility components. You just have to use them correctly.

So for the web, what are some things, though? Let's assume that somebody's listening to this and they're building web apps. What are some power tools or some easy wins that they should be familiar with? I would say that you could check out the DOM tree, for example. So work with the dev tools. And if you...

Also work with a screen reader. This would be cool. If you have a MacBook, then it's already implemented. It's worse over. But if you have a Windows machine, you can download NVDA and it's for free. Learn the basics just to listen to a website without looking at it. And would you understand it?

can you operate it with only the keyboard? This was also a very simple thing. I mean, I think that many programmers most like, uh, often only use the keyboard and do not like to use the mouse. I do not like using mouse or trackpad. I know hockey is for like everything basically. Cause I just, it slows me down so much to move my hands off the keyboard and try to do so. Yeah. This, this would be actually the first thing to just go to the tab key and tap through the website. And do you reach every button? Um, do you reach every link? Um,

Do you see the visual focus and stuff like this? And start to learn understanding the DOM tree. And you have in every browser the possibility to switch from the DOM tree to the accessibility tree, which highlights out what it's actually doing.

For the accessibility, as a screen reader users, for example, how did it is put out? I just want to define a few things real quick, like DOM tree document object model. It's basically the structure of the website. It's something that HTML uses to figure out where to put the various HTML elements and

And like everything ultimately goes onto the Dom as it's called. Uh, so, so I just want to make sure people are familiar with that. And then the other thing you mentioned there, um, in terms of, uh, the Android app. So, uh, it's called voiceover on Mac and I, I've used it before just to do experiments and like make sure free code came successful and tabbing, hitting that tab key and just go to any website and just start tabbing. And it should show you like selecting all the different menu bar items and then going through the webpage and,

Everything that's clickable should have a visual indicator that you've tabbed over to it. And I've known that ever since. Sometimes I think one of my mice broke. My cat knocked it off the table or something. And I actually had to use my keyboard only on Windows. And I figured out a way to do that using, I can't remember what it was called, but smart key or mouse keys or something like that. So it is doable. Yeah.

And it's much more precise than using a mouse. Like if you, uh, if you talk with somebody who's quadriplegic, for example, they may not have the ability to easily manipulate like a cursor, but they may be able to like, like Stephen Hawking had like his little joystick could be used for example. Um, so,

Lots of accessibility considerations in those regards. And again, good accessibility is just good usability by making your site more accessible for blind people. You're also making your site more accessible to elite hackers like Quincy Larson, who just refused to use the mouse on principle because they just want to like use hotkeys for everything. And yeah. And I've written a lot. If you start just like looking through my articles and stuff, like, like Mac has like global hotkeys that you can use like anywhere. Yeah.

Uh, I like the same like bash command line interface. Like you can use those everywhere in Mac. And that's one of the reasons I'm a big Mac stand. And I only use windows when I absolutely have to. If I, I do have a windows PC that I boot up to game sometimes, but, uh, so, uh, keyboard inputs, uh, screen reader tool. What did you say? The one on Google, uh, Android is called, uh,

DVA or something like that? NVDA. NVDA. NVDA. Yes. It's on Windows. You can download it as screen reader for Windows. Also for Mac, of course. And there's also the paid version, JAWS. JAWS, I think, is the best one out there. But since you have to pay for it, not that many people use it. But NVDA is for free.

Okay, so other than like keyboard accessibility and screen reader accessibility, and again, a lot of this stuff, your website, if you're just building things correctly with semantic HTML, like the browsers already kind of take care of this stuff for you because they're doing their best to make things accessible. But like what are some other tools and techniques that people, that developers should be aware of?

There are many browser extensions I would go through, like how to look at your website when it's just black and white. So, yeah, for people with color disabilities. Also, the contrast stuff. And even though, for example, if you do not implement on your website, this is also a common mistake I see,

If you make your website, let's say just one color and the background is white and you do not have a dark and light mode switch, this does not mean that your website will never be in dark mode because when people have the settings set on dark mode, then it will be visual also in dark mode, even if you do not implement it. And so you should also take care of this part of code that in dark mode, it will be even look good.

Yeah, so you can get your well-made bespoke dark mode or you can have whatever the software flips it to, which may look pretty bad and not be very accessible. So actually making time to make a dark mode because if you don't make a dark mode, your visitors will impose a dark mode upon your site and it may not look good. You don't have to do a switch like a dark toggle switch for this, but only implement it if the person has the setting for dark mode.

in the custom settings, then it should have this specific color. And you can check it with, in Google Chrome, it's called force dark mode. And then it's the whole website will be in dark mode to check if it's visually good and the contrast is high enough.

Yeah. And, and there are lots of tools where you can just check the contrast. Like generally black and white is the best contrast, but you can use like a, a net and Navy or something like that. One of the things that like drove me crazy was like the trend. I don't know if it's still a trend, but making like fonts thinner and thinner and making them like more delicate looking and stuff like that. But then it gets harder to read. Yes. So there's a trade off between like style and accessibility a lot of times.

Or there was a trend for a while where people would just have like really light text on a pretty light background. And yeah, I understand it may look cool and stylish and stuff, but it's not good usability. So I would urge people to...

buck those trends. Um, the other thing that, uh, you mentioned is colorblindness about 8% of men in North America are colorblind. Fortunately, I am not afflicted with colorblindness. Uh, but it is a big, like pretty obvious win. If you just want to make it like check to see, to make sure your, your designs look legible and intelligible, uh, with, uh,

Like you can simulate like with those plugins you mentioned, you can get a browser extension and you can simulate colorblindness. Yeah. Colorblindness is especially important when you, that you not convey any meaning only by color.

Like in forms or when you like a to-do list that do not say that when it's a red background, then you have to do it still to do it. Or when it's a yellow background, then you're currently working on it. And then when it's green background, because people may cannot distinguish. So you always should add an icon in front of it that it's more clear that these are three different things and not only rely on color.

Yeah. So, so using the use of icons in combination with color in combination with like as many visual indicators as you can give people, uh, as many like, yeah. So, so don't be afraid to like a lot of people may like the, like, like these crisp minimalist designs, but sometimes that can go against legibility. Um, yeah. One of the things that I'm really excited to learn a little bit about, uh, from you is just what you have, uh,

what you've observed in terms of how different companies react to like, so I think I mentioned in the U S we had this big dominoes lawsuit and the company just did not want to invest in accessibility. Uh, but what have you seen in terms of like working with different, uh, partnerships, like in terms of in Europe, how seriously they take accessibility versus, um, uh,

you know, like the horror stories you hear about companies, you know, like literally resisting in a court of law, having to make their website accessible, like the, like the nominal situation.

Yeah, I would say that unfortunately, I guess it's everywhere the same. There are some people who built in accessibility also. I personally advise some smaller companies from friends or something, and they are very into, okay, make it accessible because this is the law. Maybe even they are not affected now, maybe they're affected in the future and they care about their clients. This

This is very interesting that even small companies do care and then implement it. But bigger companies, I think the bigger they get, they're like, okay, just pay it. And I don't get it. I really don't get it. First of all, I always think that if you would teach your software engineers what accessibility is...

Don't you want to have a good team? Someone who writes good code? For me, this has so much to do with good code quality and also so much to do with a good developer experience. I come to code bases, I think I do not want even to look at this code. It's terrible. How can people work in this team? And it's like, who cares? And I don't get the mentality, actually. I think this is so much more about...

It always depends on the whole team and then the different individual, because even if you are the one who is interested in accessibility, when there are six other developers who don't care, then you have no chance to make it more accessible.

Well, maybe you could be the squeaky wheel and you could just push and continue to advocate within your team, even if everybody else is indifferent about it. Um, I mean, for us, like there is no accessibility consideration that is too small. If somebody opens an issue and it's an accessibility issue that they're experiencing, I just assume there are probably 50 or a hundred people that are experiencing the same thing that haven't been gotten out of their way to mention it. Uh,

Because everybody has these different lived experiences. Everybody has different hurdles that they have to overcome. And it's totally worth it, in my mind, to make it a priority to help those people. I think also from a developer perspective, I think it's very interesting what you can do with code. Why do you want to write this cool kind of code which could help so many people?

Yeah. Take the piss out of the coat. Well, one last topic I want to talk with you about, Yulia, is languages. Now, you are somebody who obviously you speak excellent English. You probably grew up speaking German, I believe, is the language that most people in Austria speak. And then you went to college and you learned how to speak Japanese. And you actually create tutorials in Japanese, which is pretty cool. Yes.

Like Japanese is not an easy language to learn and to be able to use the language at a level where you can actually use it as a language and instruction to teach other people how to do things. It's very impressive. We live in an era when like you could just hold up your phone and like have some speech translated and it may not be perfect, but it might be good enough. Why learn languages in 2025? Yeah.

I think it's interesting. Interesting, first of all, I mean, I love the country and I love the culture. That's why I wanted to learn the language. I think you can only understand the culture and the people if you also know the language. And it's also, what do you do the whole day? I mean, this is a hobby. I love learning new things and learning.

I think that it's good that we can speak inside the phone and a lot of language comes out for people who cannot speak the language, but just doing it out of because I'm lazy, I'm not that kind of person. I leave it to the people who rely on it, but I do not rely on it. What are some of the most common things that you use your Japanese language skills for other than when you're traveling to Japan and actually interacting with Japanese people? Do you consume a lot of Japanese media?

Um, yeah, it depends. It's, it's, it could be more. Unfortunately, I think the movies are not that fun. I would watch more movies in Japanese, but, um, also writing my blog posts. So I have my blog accessibility first and I write it in German, English and Japanese.

This is most likely what I'm using it for. So you'll write the article. You'll say, okay, now I'm going to write the English version. Now I'm going to write the German version. Now I'm going to write the Japanese version. The original one is in the English one. Yes, the original one is in the English one. And then I go to the German and Japanese one. That's cool. And for you, it's just like a self-actualization, like a fulfilling thing. Would you consider it a point of pride that you can speak these languages? Pride? Yeah.

Like, are you proud of your accomplishment? Like for myself, I think it's fun and I love it. And this was also what, what encouraged me to do my first YouTube video because it was in Japanese. I thought it sounds cool. Just do it. I mean, it's novel. Yeah. I could never bring myself to do it in English or German. It's like, ah, it's a boring. Um, but then in Japanese I thought, okay, why not?

Do you think you're somebody who just likes to layer additional difficulty on top of everyday things? Maybe. Like teaching herself to code was not hard enough. Now she has to teach herself how to teach others how to code in Japanese. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do you play video games on hard mode a lot? I'm too bad. Hard mode. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, Julia, it's been, I keep calling you Julia, but I know it's pronounced Julia in German. And you referred to yourself as Julia earlier. Yeah, I know. So, Julia, I've thoroughly enjoyed learning more about you, learning about your journey. Do you have any parting advice to people who are learning the code in 2025? Even if it feels hard in the current situation, which I heard from other people, I would say do not give up. Be dedicated to what you're doing and keep

It takes time. Even though I also was in many points where I thought I should give up. Maybe there's no, I did not feel any progress. But in the end, if you do not give up, I would say that you will get there where you want to be. Yeah. Awesome. Well, everyone tuning in, I hope you've enjoyed this conversation. Until next week, happy coding. Thank you. Bye.