Trends in Digital Accessibility for 2025 – what you need to know

JONATHAN: So, why? Why bother doing this? You know, why is this worth your time at an important time of the year? The key thing from our perspective is – if a trend is a trend, it is not enough, it needs to be something that is going to be impactful for your organisation. You need to understand why these things matter for you. Why accessibility matters is summarised on this slide. This is an Ipsos inequalities global survey that happened in 2023. What they found was that people with disabilities, other than any other group, were suffering most from discrimination, that they were most disadvantaged. That is what, in a digital space and slightly beyond, accessibility is trying to help counter and so, hopefully, all of the things that we do as a community together, we are going to change those figures. The problem is, though, however that you know, even for those organisations who are really committed to accessibility, so for example, Valuable 500 companies, they have made commitments to disability inclusion, and organisations that have to do it because of their local regulations, so here in the UK we have something called PSBAR for UK councils, to say they need accessibility. And here is something you can find from Silktide They are one of those organisation that has automated tools and this is a graph of how many organisations are scoring well in different ways. What you can find is that the UK Councils in general are doing a lot better than the Valuable 500 companies at the moment. But ideally, all of these organisationsshould be at 100. 100 actually isn’t even WCAG here. 100 is the part of WCAG. The 30% of the WCAG 2.1 AA and 2.2 AA success criteria that are able to be tested by an automated tool.

So, we have just not got there yet. There is still work to do. So, therefore, how do these trends impact that work that you are all so feverishly doing. Here are a couple of ways you can look at it. I don’t think these are the trends you need to know. This is WebAIM Million, saying the number of errors on homepages. They looked at 1 million homepages because they are an organisation that has an automated testing tool. They looked at 1 million pages and actually the number of errors this year has gone up. That is not what anyone wanted to hear. If we look at the Web Almanac. And Mike Gifford, a great guy, put a lot of time and effort into this, lots in here and from Lighthouse, the other tool out there, they found things had got a bit better. But not massively better. You know, the job isn’t done yet.

The difficulty with this stuff – I don’t know about you – but it kind of makes me feel either disempowered or depressed really. Because you are probably trying to make one or a few websites accessible. If you do that, these figures won’t change because there are so many websites out there. So, this stuff – kind of nice to know about – not really what we need. Accessibility is now a bandwagon. This is a really positive figure. So, I have been tracking the number of people who have accessibility in their job title for years now. And we went up from 11,000 to 13,000 over the course of last year. So, yey, more of us doing this stuff all around the globe. Really good. There is also more companies. So, things like the EAA, which we will be talking about a lot. Have brought in a lot of companies that are not specialists at all. There are a lot of companies out there that don’t know what to do when we have somebody who has a vague idea about accessibility on their team. They go – this is a service we can do; can we do audits? Gov.uk has very good things to say about that here in the UK, about not necessarily going for the cheapest suppliers. There is one other thing I would say about that, is that our research in 2022, 300 companies globally were involved in this, they said that only 31% of them actually fixed issues with the audits they have done. So basically, if accessibility is all about what you have got wrong, you can find in an audit, then there is lots of money being spent with the wrong people that is potentially having no impact on actually fixing products. That is wasting money. That is not what we want.

So, what do we want? Well, these are not the trends that you need to know either. I put this into ChatGPT and I said: What are the accessibility trends for this year – because it would have saved me a lot of time this month – pretty much all of these are absolute garbage or incredibly old. For example if I just pick on, I don’t know, “Enhanced mobile accessibility.” We are doing more mobile accessibility these days than we ever have. Yes, since 2013. That is not a trend for 2025. Voice and gesture interfaces, yes, they have been around for donkeys years. Yes, legal compliance imperatives are there. Yes, we are doing great stuff. They have got so many things slightly wrong. More accessibility and marketing, absolutely. It is really good to make sure your website is accessible. No, what we find is that most marketing organisations don’t do websites. So that is why they didn’t do accessibility in the past. We will talk about that. There are lots of things here in terms of, you know a focus on inclusive design, we are doing more inclusive design than ever before, yeah, every year since about what, 2010? Maybe the year 2000.

You know, all of the stuff that you are getting out there at the moment, I don’t think is particularly helpful. And the reason you are getting it is because it is all sales material. You know – and we are selling here as well, so there is a lot in this session today. Please don’t try to take it all in. Let it kind of wash over you and then, throughout the year, you will be able to go back through the transcript and back to the video and say: Wasn’t there something in that Webinar about it? The key thing here is that most of the stuff that ChatGPT picks up is companies selling their products to you. What you get from this session, is selling strategy. That is what we do at Hassell Inclusion. That is why you won’t find our stuff in ChatGPT because it’ll all be behind a password at HiHub. It’s for you, but it is not for our competitors, so therefore, it is not for ChatGPT either. And fundamentally, it is what we think is what really matters this year. So, if you want to share this stuff, please do, but please credit us and don’t share the whole thing, if you like, share little bits of it.

So, we have got a number – we have eight trends for where we start 2025. We have another one for where I think we are going. And we have another one for where we need to be as an industry. So, we are going to be going through all of those and if you are thinking: I don’t know if these guys are right, why should I listen? Well, we have been pretty good in the last five years, these are the last three posters we have done on this and we have been way in advance of most organisations out there.

So, we’ll kick off with the first one, accessibility legislation, it is getting tougher and linking to the standards. The disability discrimination laws exist and have existed for a long time in most countries already. We have 70 different countries that we are monitoring actively, at Hassell Inclusion, these are just five of them. But, if you want to know what is happening in various different countries, come to us and we can tell you. In 2024, not very much happened in terms of legislation from our perspective. There was a real flurry at the end of 2023 in the States. And 2024 was more about legislators kind of like catching up with that stuff. The main thing that everybody wanted to talk about the EAA, from the poll on LinkedIn, actually came in, in 2019. It’s six years old. So, as I say, there is a little bit of a lag here. The key things that have changed recently, is to do with monitoring bodies and penalties, when it comes to EAA. And stuff around WCAG 2.2. So, for those of you who weren’t with the kind of plan last year, the European Accessibility Act basically requires if you are any of these types of organisations, a banking organisation, eCommerce, travel, streaming, or for that matter, PDFs – sorry e-pubs, so e-books, you need to get good at accessibility if you are working in Europe. We have a whole Webinar on this one that you can look at. The deadline for services like that is June 28th this year.

For products, things like kiosks and ATMs, i.e. hardware, there is another five years that you have. That is the sort of thing that is happening in Europe. We will be touching on that in this session. In the States it was the Department of justice and the notice for the proposed rule-making in August 23. And M-24-08. If you are in the States, you know about this. It is a year old. This is what is important. Around about April we started to looking to see how many monitoring bodies. These are the organisations that would say – if you have got it wrong, we are going to give you a penalty in all of the different Member States in the EU bloc. There are 27, four have monitoring bodies in April last year. That is up to 25 now. So that means there may not have been much happening in terms of what we do, but the people who have come along to be the police force for that have been changing and growing in number. The penalties have been numerated a bit more than they have previously. In France it could be 20,000 euros per year if you don’t do things right by the EAA. In Norway, and this is going back to 2018 but they may do it again, it is 15,000 euros per day for organisations who got on the wrong side of their monitoring people. In Ireland, this is either terrifying or hilarious, depending on how much you think is going to happen. Yes, you can actually be thrown into prison for 18 months, if you are a Director of a company that doesn’t abide by the EAA. I don’t know how you feel about that. But that is what is happening.

In the States, there are loads of lawsuits. In general, very, very similar to 2023. UsableNet do a really, really good report. There is a link here. I suggest you go and have a look at that. But in general people are suing each other all over the States, around about 4,000 cases in 2024, like 2023. But the big thing that is happening is the goalposts are moving. It used to be it was 2.1AA, the obvious thing everyone was trying to get to. Now we are now about a year and two months after WCAG 2.2AA came in. So, the grace periods for a lot of legislation in different countries have come through, for example, here in the UK, the public sector bodies, so Government, need to do 2.2. In the States, it’s not there in the ADA or anything like that but it is in New York State and Colorado and California, which is where most of the lawsuits is happening. It is there in Canada and probably by February 2026 in Europe and many companies are moving to it as well. So, lots of things happening towards that. We did a whole Webinar on this, in terms of what you should do if you are currently still working on 2.1 and you need to go to 2.2, just over a year ago; literally the day it came out. So, go and have a look at that.

So, what does this mean, all of this legislation? Well, those companies who are doing pretty well, are more relaxed. Those who are struggling to get compliant are really in a bit of a pickle at the moment. Not being fined is a small win but if the cost of compliance is lower than the fine… So, companies are thinking how much is it going to cost to live up to the EAA. We are helping people with strategic plans for that. And trying to work out, actually, if they get better at accessibility, can we actually help them win, rather than just avoid losing. Firstly, and a few things around the European Accessibility Act are in these initial trends. The first one is: Pushing us beyond one-time compliance to embedding. For those of you who know us at Hassell Inclusion, we have been talking about this for a long time. It is there in the EAA as well. Everybody thinks it is making sure you get up to WCAG or EN 301559 if it is a product. But once you get to compliance, it is what are your processes to stay there. We will also be talking in the next part of this about how to document that. So, for those of you who want to bring your lawyers in on this and we have seen lots and lots of lawyers over the last six months on this side of things, these are some actual things from the Act itself. Just talking about demonstrating that the supply delivery process and its monitoring ensure compliance as a service in an ongoing way. That is what people are asking for. What that means is you are going to have to test loads. And you are going to have to fix loads. So, how do you make that efficient? Well, at the very least you will have to do loads of audits. I would suggest you probably might want to get an automated tool to help you. I would suggest that you actually train up some of your people to test themselves. Those could be QA testers or they could be full-on auditors. Because if this is more important for you, in an ongoing way, it’s good to bring this sort of stuff in-house. If you really want to get good, you want to do some user testing.

So, there is some stuff here as well about what is useful about WCAG. What automated testing can do as well. But the key thing I want to say is this: Testing accessibility is not rocket science. Some parts of it are but some parts of it are really, really simple. Here is a quote from the head of QA from HSBC Canada when I was over there about six years ago pre-pandemic and training their QA testers. “Before the course I was a bit in awe of accessibility auditors. Now I know what our QAs can do this too and we can have a bigger impact than they do.” So, they can check the product being created so it is a lot more efficient. This is when we trained people at NatWest. So, they had been doing loads of audits with their external supplier and they wanted to see – could they train up their own people. So, we trained 12 of their people. They did a comparative test a few months after and they got exactly the same results from the people that we trained than their external auditors. So, they don’t need them anymore. Is that something that might be useful for you? We have actually put an extra Webinar on for you, if you need this sort of thing. Because audit training is really, really important, I think, with where we are going. We need to be able to check we are doing well.

You also need to get your capability right. So, you know, once you have found the problems, if you have got multiple products, how do you fix them? There is a few ideas here on the screen as to how to do that. And also, our course that enables you to actually start shifting this left into product management. So, it is there in your requirements and so, by the time testing happens, chances are the results of that testing are things you want to see rather than things that make you cry. So, yeah, loads of organisations are thinking – how do we do audits repeatedly. We can help you with that stuff and it really comes down to empowering you through training. If that sounds like it might be interesting to you, please get in touch.

So, if we are looking at, OK, so we need to make sure our products and services are good and we need to test them and we need to fix the problem. One of the other things the EAA is talking about as well is making sure people understand what you have been able to deliver in your products. So, this is a kind of general description of the service and information necessary to understand the functioning of it. It is basically, if I have a disability, do I know how your product actually supports me? We did some research in 2023 on this, across UK banks and what we found was that the apps were better than what they said about them. They had all sorts of great accessibility features and you couldn’t see them at all from the outside. So, if you were somebody who has a disability in the UK and you wanted to know which of these banks should I bank with, which ones are going to be best for me, ain’t no information out there. That was 2023. Thankfully things have started to get better. I will give you examples of organisations doing things well all the way through the session. This is Canon and a bank in the UK called Monzo. They have great accessibility features. Similarly, HSBC and Barclays who are doing really great pages about communication and what they have been able to achieve and Santander have even got videos for us. So, this stuff really, really important. And the other great thing about it, is that it allows you to actually get the return on investment. If you spend loads of time and effort making the things that you were working on accessible, and you don’t tell anyone about them, who has a disability, why would they use the product or service you are creating? If they don’t use it, then you actually haven’t created any return on investment for your organisation. You have just, if you like, got rid of the legal worries. Not enough in this year. We will see exactly why it is not enough in this year. So, it is really important to do that.

Communicating your accessibility successes, we had a whole Webinar on that last year. So, you can grab the recording on that. The last thing and people really have not been doing a lot about this at all so accessibility statements and things at least they know, what about your customer service people? If I can’t use your website because I have a disability and I phone your customer service people and tell them that and say – I was listening to your web site with JAWS and it wasn’t working for me at all, would the person on the customer service line go, “Listening to the website on JAWS? Oh, that person is blind, it was the screen-reader I was told about.” Or would they go, “Sorry you were listening to our website, are you mad?” That is what you don’t want to happen. So, there is good stuff in EAA saying if you have a customer service line you need to train the people. We have been doing this for a long time. We were doing it with the UK Parliament digital service and there is a whole case study there if you want to come back to it later. So, people are struggling to get this information out there. we can help is the long-story-short of this slide. So, I will move on.

EAA talks about hardware. Some of you are thinking ATMs, kiosks, that is interesting. We have not really been playing in this space before. Well, yeah, the Act says if you have those, you need to start playing in that space. But as I say, thankfully it is 2030 rather than this year that you need to actually get yourself into things that works for people. This is what we would call a hybrid experience. So, for example, a self-checkout has a screen like your iPad. It has all sorts of other things and also, it is not my screen, I can’t move in anywhere I want. That sort of thing changes things. So, it is a combination of digital accessibility and ergonomic, if you like, accessibility that needs to come together to make these things happen. It is all of the stuff here in the physical accessibility guidance that really isn’t can’t quite so well embedded in things like WCAG. That is the sort of place you need to go. But to give you an idea if you are in the digital world and you are thinking your way in, some of the things you already know that is really important, heading for example, to enable people to get around pages, are rather like signs to enable people to get around in shops.

The way the signs work, is very similar to the way headings work, if you have an assistive technology that works with them. And we do. Things like SeeingAI, Navilens all of these technologies on your phone, can actually enable you to navigate around digital spaces if you have the right tech. Useful things there and the key things here, from our perspective, having played in this space for a while, is if you have one of those self-service terminals, it is not enough for to you make sure that the terminal works. You need to make sure you looked at it as an end-to-end user journey. If I cannot get to that terminal, it doesn’t matter how good the accessibility is. If I don’t know where it is, how will I know? If you are a blind person in the station, think about how you would buy a ticket on the ticket machine. That is the sort of place you need to be thinking. We have been working on this, I think it was as far as back as 2005, something like that, working with the Science Museum and Google to do exhibits that were physical and digital in the Science Museum in London. If you are into this sort of thing, have a read of that. If any of this is chiming with you, we have been doing this for a long time and we would love to help. We want to help organisations get an idea of what people with disabilities need, bearing in mind the guidelines. You cannot go, let’s just use WCAG, you need to do the research to see what people need because most of the guidelines are not good enough yet.

Cool, OK. Section 5. Hopefully you are staying with me. As I say let it wash over you and the things that were really important, in a week you will be able to go back through this at whatever speed you like on HiHub, so you get exactly what you need at the speed you like. Regulatory regulations. One of the things that are pushing us beyond websites is talking about hardware and we are now talking about is accessible comms. As I say, those of you who came to our Webinar back earlier last year will have seen some of this stuff already. A lot of the industries like banking, or energy supply, are regulated, certainly here in the UK and when we were doing that Webinar, we found a lot of people were saying similar things in their countries, too. Oftentimes, the things they are asking about are not websites, they are access to relevant information. Enabling people to self-identify and making sure that they can understand information, as well as access it. So, the “understand” bit if you are a WCAG nut. Oftentimes is not established in WCAG. This is saying – what does it really take to understand information? It is not just about – does it play well or communicate well with the screen reader, it’s about how you write it.  So, this is being used, as I say, in various different places in industry. The key thing here was that when we started thinking about things this way, it became really, really clear that one of the key groups that had a particular need here, were people who were neurodivergent or the whole neurodiversity agenda, if you like. Unfortunately, WCAG does a really, really bad job of looking at their needs. We know because we did the research to plug the gap for the National Autistic Society in 2019. We did loads of user research. 400 people. We found the guidelines that were missing, if you like and of the 49 that mattered to that audience, 41 were not in WCAG at all. If you want to do stuff when it comes to neurodiversity, you need to be thinking somewhere else.

We have some really good stuff on that. We have a whole Webinar about vulnerability if that is your bag. But the interesting thing was, that woke up, if you like, the whole marketing industry and financial industry but the marketing industry had been waking up previously. So, 2021 the UK Government basically said to their communications agencies: If you can’t do accessibility, we don’t want to work with you. What that meant was, that loads of them went – we have gone through the website and they were, yeah, but you do social media, e-mails and stuff on Facebook, on YouTube. All of these different ways to communicate information all need to be accessible. That is the sort of thing that the world of today is like. It is one of the reasons why our Accessibility for Marketing Creatives course is the most popular course we have at the moment because it focuses on how do you make sure all of these different media are accessible and it also brings in that neurodiversity that is so important. We know people are really interesting in this. We had over 1,000 registrations for our creating Accessible Documents Webinar in July. If you were on it, I hope you liked it, if not, you can get it on HiHub.

But the key thing is that this stuff is not just important for registrations. It is because this is how we do digital. If you think about how we buy something, there are so many things in there that are not just the website or the app that you buy from. There is the social media that tells you about it. There is the marketing e-mail that tells you about it. There is the confirmation e-mail that says – yes, we have picked up your order and then there is delivery, potentially to your house that also needs to be accessible, too. This whole end-to-end experience needs to work for you to buy something. It is not just the website that is the sort of thing you need to be thinking about in 2025. It is the sort of things that we do all the time. If you want to switch to that sort of thing like Tui, we can help. One of the things I’m trying to do here, is to help you understand how this can be beneficial to your organisation. They are a travel company and they said when they started thinking about things from a commercial perspective, they said people with access needs spent more, stayed longer, travelled more and travelled in larger groups than those without access needs. As far as they’re concerned, Accessibility is good business. But none of that would have been possible without your end-to-end journey focus. You need people to get the product. So, we need to think about beyond websites, it is about communication. We have been doing this for a very long time. Most organisations struggle to get the PDFs right. Let alone their e-mails, their social media and everything else when it comes to accessibility. You know, we have had over 2,000 people through our course on campaign marketing. If that would be helpful for you, please let us know.

Cool. OK. We are into the second half and we are just about to get political. Sorry if you don’t like politics, but it is just about to arrive in spades because it’s been thrown at us this year and we need to look at it. This one is looking at economics DEI and what this means for procurement. So, you will have seen all of the chaos around DEI, especially in the States. You know, this is Trump basically saying – actually you are all on leave. This is an opinion from Money Week, saying “Thank God DEI has gone because we couldn’t afford it.” And over here on the left, there are too many things to put on the screen. That is Mark Zukerberg saying they are not doing it at Meta. And this is the backlash to the backlash. This is the UK Meta staff saying, “I don’t know if we want to work for Meta anymore if we are not caring about diversity and inclusion.” Here is Apple saying, “Actually our investors are saying that they want us to roll with this as well and to shatter all of our DEI efforts. No, we are not doing that, we want to create a culture of belonging and that is who we are as an organisation.” At the bottom, Walmart faced a backlash from their investors. They wanted to cancel some of the DEI but their investors didn’t.

So, this stuff is very political. What’s going on? I think it is about economics as much as politics. So, some of the money journalists, as I say, were saying all of this being nice, companies kind of doing the right things, we can’t afford it and we have never been able to afford it. I think they are wrong. So, unless you have to cosy up to Trump because you need to be in his good books, actually there are huge numbers of articles out there that say – if you are younger, you care about this stuff. Maybe older people not so much but younger people actually want to work in a place that gives them purpose. Where they feel they are working for the good guys, not the bad guys. Where they are working for a company that actually thinks about including people, rather than excluding them. That is why I believe that some of the backlash is coming through and why Apple stood up and said no, they were not going to do it. In the accessibility industry, though, there has been real worry about this. Which is if DEI has gone, then will accessibility go as well? I’m here to hopefully give you an angle on this, that you can give to your bosses about why some of these things are not quite as simple as – no DEI, no accessibility.

So, I’m going to make a difference between what I would term “inclusive representation” – which are things like making sure that people on-screen, so in films and things, actually represent the diversity of the population – and “inclusive representation”; in terms of things like affirmative action, making sure that people are recruited into companies based on the make-up of society rather than the biases of the people who may work in those companies already. Organisations do this sort of thing because they want to be a better place. They want to improve the world. It is very noticeable, however, for people who don’t like it. You know, all of that “woke” stuff, why are there so many people who aren’t white in Star Wars? All of that sort of stuff that most of us, I think, find rather offensive. That is the backlash to inclusive representation. The people that are doing the inclusive representation hope that their theme is being progressive, rather than sort of “woke” as it were and younger people tend to go more with progressive. Older people actually with – I don’t like this thing, it is not the way it used to be, or whatever. So, this is a risk from return on investment perspective. It opens organisations up to basically the football that gets bounced backwards and forwards, depending on who is in political power. At the moment it is going in the wrong direction.

Inclusive design is different. That is the thing to get here. This is the big slide, hopefully that you can grab and take away. Inclusive design is for the people who are being designed for. So inclusive representation, putting someone who looks a particular way in a film, doesn’t actually impact society very much, other than very, very slowly. Making somebody able to use your product impacts their ability to use your product directly. That is the big difference here. Organisation do it because they certainly don’t want the world to exclude anybody but it is more than that. It is not noticeable most of the time to people who don’t need it. If you make your website work for a screen reader, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people who don’t use screen readers are going to be aware of that or even sort of, you know, have a view on it. So, the key things here really is that when you do this sort of stuff, if you are a company that sells things, say you are Amazon, I can sell more things because you can sell to more people and are including more people in your marketing. If you are a government, you are actually enabling people to get services from a government that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise. Maybe they would have to go to the Town Hall or something lick that to get it. So fundamentally it actually makes money. The other thing, it makes perfect economic sense in whatever climate we are in. But especially in the climate that we are in at the moment.

Here in the UK, one of the things the Government is trying to do is to get the growth agenda working again. I’m going to see if I can restart my video. There you are. You can see me better now. That is because they can’t afford to have loads of people who have disabilities on benefits. They are not making money for the country and they are also taking money from the country in benefits. That is how economists will think about this. So, the UK Government is trying to get all of these people back to work. That will save the country’s finance and give people with disabilities the purpose they get from having a job, it is a great idea if… Here are some of the figures. 2.8 million people in the UK out of work due to disability or ill-health and the spending on sickness and disability benefits set to increase by 30 billion. So, that stuff about – we can’t afford people to not be in work – has some truth in it. The key thing is there’s a really great document here from Disability rights UK, that effectively says the reason these people aren’t in work is very complicated but oftentimes it comes down to your company: Does your company want to have somebody who is disabled actually working for you? And particularly where organisations do that, they fail to provide reasonable adjustments. And that is where Accessibility comes in.

So, say for example I’m blind, I start in your company, you give me JAWS as a reasonable adjustment, ta-da, life is peachy. No, it isn’t. If all of the tools that I have to use in my day-to-day life actually don’t work with JAWS in the company, I can’t do my job. That is the cost of a lack of inclusive design in products. People can’t do their job. If they can’t do their job, they will have to leave again. You see the importance here? So, it is really important to see the economics of this stuff. You know, companies need to start saying – we aren’t going to buy digital tools unless they are accessible. This is, if you like, the journey a lot of them are going through to do that, which is really going to help people with disabilities who are employees and also the countries that they live in, too. And there is lots of useful stuff. We did a whole Webinar on this a little while ago, that could really help hopefully to get you to where you might want to be thinking in terms of – what do we do in terms of a company who is buying software and what are we doing if we are a company who actually makes software? How do we get this right? We work on both sides. We would love to help you in this space. Three more and we are done. 13 minutes.

So, we are moving into AI. It is the other big thing happening. The last three are around AI and the different aspects. The first one comes from Sam Lewis, hi if you are watching, the CEO of the T&Pm Agency in the States. He summarised in this MediaPost what we have been talking about for a while. So, I wanted to give credit to him. The more you use it, the more you realise that for many tasks, AI doesn’t get you all the way there. It is not awful; it is just not good enough. Accurately assessing where this balance lies will become an increasingly important skillset requiring practitioners who can blend business, creative and tech experience to make strategic AI decisions. This is our job in the future, for example. This is our jobs this year, I would suggest. It is really important to know what AI is good at and what it isn’t good at. A few examples. Why do we have MyClearText doing the captions for the Webinar? We have a real human being captioning this right this very second. They are wonderful. The reason they are wonderful is because they are helping us get past this issue. Most auto-captioning misses out on important things, like names. Hassell Inclusion wouldn’t be spelt right and things like WCAG sometimes come out wrong. This was Otter trying to actually do the auto-captions for one of our webinars a few years ago. This is the proper transcript. Just this thing, if you look here, I said, “WCAG 2.1AA.” That was very important to know I was talking about 2.1AA, not 2.2AA or anything else. That came out in the otter transcript as “wuchang, 2.2 point one double A.” It sounded like I was very confused. I wasn’t but it thought I was. That would be a grand fail for Hassell Inclusion. As Sam Lewis was talking about. Captions, really important.

Alt text. Let’s talk alt text for a bit. It is great. We all need it if we are using a screen reader to look at a website or an app or something like that. All of the images need to have alt text and AI can help. This is Word trying to automatically create some alt text for this particular image here. If you see Yac on the video, this is Yac. This is Yac’s own personal Lego figure. This is a photo and we said, “What is this?” “A toy figurine of a person holding a sign.” Do you like that? Is it good enough? Here are some other ways we looked at it. This was Facebook. LinkedIn didn’t try for an automated one. Facebook said, “Maybe an image of a toy and text.” So, if you put this out, of Yac looking at his new figure, isn’t it amazing, if he had an image and forgot the alt text, somebody would get,”Maybe an image of a toy and text”. Not Great. Here’s ChatGPT. ‘A custom lego figure with dark hair and a beard, wearing a purple shirt that says it depends’. You can see all the rest of it, it is pretty good. In fact, it is really interesting. Yac took it and put it into Gemini to say, “Can you get me an image based on this alt text?” And this is what it generated. Now again these slight little problems. WCAG, it’s not WCAAG it’s WCAG. It was there in the prompt. So, there are some problems with this. What do you do when the world is kind of like 90% there with AI but not 100%. Well, we have been playing around with this for a while.

So, some options for solving this are the things we are thinking about. So,

three different ways of strategically thinking about this. Maybe you need to do a better prompt.

So, if you are using ChatGPT you can say, “I really loved that alt text thing but actually, WCAG says that alt text should only be really like about 40 or 50 characters and you have given me too much information.” So, I could say, “Can you give me some alt text for that in less than 50 characters.” That would improve the prompt and give me better alt text. Another way of doing things, that we have been playing around with stuff, when things go wrong, when things come out where a summary says one thing but actually the article says something different. And when the summary and the article are kind of different like that, that is really, really problematic if you are working in a technical sphere. You might want to cache things and fix the output. You will see how we are using that later on in the year, with something cool coming. Or you might go – this is too difficult for AI at the moment, so we will do it ourselves. You have choices. That is the thing. How are you going to use your choices? We are advising organisations in this area at the moment. If you are trying to use AI and accessibility well, then it is good to try to get as good quality as you can get. That human element and how you play with the AI is going to be really useful. Why individuals should tell us which AI is best for them, not technology suppliers. So, this was another one of the things I think we are seeing happening at the moment. There are lots of AI-based assistive tech that is being sold at you. Here is Microsoft and Co-pilot, they are doing great things and might work for somebody who has a disability near you. ZammoAI are doing great things in recruitment and Allianz, they are doing great things. Everybody is saying AI this and that, come and buy our thing.

I want to look at this from the perspective of – shall we listen to the user? I will look at summarisation. This is important for me, it is how I created parts of this Webinar, or at least did the research. This is something that I found. This is a health tracker for your cat. And there was a great article in the Atlantic, the person basically said, “It freaked the hell out of me because it kept on telling me that my cat had walked five paces less than yesterday.” And then I was like, “What do I do with that information?” That is the thing. We need summarisation because people have the ability to generate loads of data and loads of notifications to try to make you to come back to their app to say – is there something happening? If you don’t know how to clear out the stuff that matters, to the stuff that doesn’t, you need summarisation. Here is another one, Mike, if you are on the call, sorry, this was my best example of this. I love your Web Almanac. A lot of people on the call love your Web Almanac. It does go on for a very long time! And the reason why it does that – kind of like this Webinar – I don’t know which part you want. So, I will give you the ability to summarise the transcript later so you can get to the bit you want. Similarly, WCAG audits, they are impenetrable for most people who get them. People love our live audits. Here is the quote, “You think completely differently to us, we can’t see the wood for the trees. The focused view in your Live Audit was so useful.” We get to the nub of the issue rather than giving you everything.

There is stuff in here about accuracy and privacy. I think I probably don’t have time to go into it in great depth. But the key thing here is this: These are three different roles, non-disabled researcher, a dyslexic student and a dyslexic HR manager. They have different requirements for the ability to check the accuracy of the summarisation and the privacy threshold. For example, some of you are probably looking at Deepseek. It is really, really cheap. It has totally changed AI, again. And it is in China. So, every single bit of information you put into it, however private, might become part of the Chinese, you know, world. You may not want that. These are some of the things you should be thinking about. When you are procuring AI, you should be asking people: What is it you want? Rather than: We have this AI, go and use it and think about those other things. There is also some bias in there. But all of this stuff was really talked about in October in Accessibility & AI. So, it is there. AI Agents. This is where the world is waking up to at the moment. ‘SAAS is dead.’ ‘AI agents are going to take on the world.’ Trust me, if you are a large organisation, you are getting sold a hell of a lot of this stuff.

Bill Gates and Sam Altman say this is the most important thing in the world. But unfortunately, the current versions of this aren’t very good. We have been working in this area for a hell of a long time. In fact, I did my DPhil thesis on this when I was at university in 1995. So, the way this stuff works and the way of thinking about it is, rather than going to a website, you will have an agent and you will ask it a question and it’ll find information from multiple places and it’ll give you an answer in the format you want. “So, I want this information so it works well with my screen reader.” You know, “I’m dyslexic, so I cannot have any of those colours.” That sort of thing. So, in this world, accessibility is actually completely different from now. I’m going to pop these slides through from there because we don’t have time to properly look at them. But come back, have a look at this stuff. Because this is where we are going next year, I think.

And one final thing: You have seen that I have tried to give a lot of examples of companies getting stuff right in here. There are a few of them here. I have referenced companies all the way through. Not enough companies are doing this. Saying – look, we did really great accessibility stuff, because they are worried about seeming immodest. Not the sort of thing we do. And they know there are things they haven’t got right so far. The one thing we would ask you this year, if you are doing something that is really brilliant, tell people about it. Because in a world where people are out there who hate accessibility with a passion, they are trying to say there is no business case for this, the current business cases that we have published out there aren’t really cutting it. This is the W3C site. This is one from Apple. I love Apple. But there is nothing in here that would help me to understand how doing accessibility in my small business was going to be a good, sensible thing to do from a business perspective. This one from MPR Weekly Broadcast, never heard of them but I know from doing accessibility, the search traffic went out.

All of these sorts of things; it is miles better. Anyone remember this? This is the Tesco business case that was on the site for a few years. The reason is because it has pound signs, dollar signs. It can say – when we did accessibility, the impact was we made money. That cuts through. It is 20 years old and it is like, when you look into it, it is of no relevance today at all. This one is miles better. Airbnb. I don’t know if you are on the call. Love this. The category – so they did work on accessibility, not just to make the site more accessible. But they were thinking about how people with disabilities might come to the site, what were they looking for? They were looking for accessible places to stay. They created a whole new category and they’ve made 5.5 million from that. A very good news story. That is the reason why we will continue to do accessibility. Who cares what Trump says! That is the sort of thing you need, I would suggest, in 2025. So, we are helping organisations win from accessibility all the time. We are getting them awards and things like that. We are committed to try to get more of their stories out there. There are more business cases. If you can do the same, that would be great.

So, there we are, that was your 2025 Accessibility Trends. I hope that has been really, really useful. We don’t have any time for questions, we have run over a minute. Sorry about that. Please, if there are things that this has kicked off in you, e-mail us. You can go to our contact us form on our website. We have more webinars coming up. There was one on debunking accessibility myths next month and about neurodivergence the month after that. This is the free thing. If you have your camera phone, there is a whole book here about how to get good at accessibility within your organisation. It has been available for a while. I recorded it as an audio book in November, it came out a few weeks ago, I would like you to have it for free. So, you can follow the QR code and there are a few questions about how you feel about accessibility and things and then you will get the audio book to listen to. Thank you so much for your time. I hope that has been of help to you. I hope all of the chat and all of the questions in there have been very, very useful. As I say, we are here as your resource to understand not just what accessibility is but why it matters to your organisation. This can be a win for you in 2025. If there are questions you need to ask us about that, to help you further, please get in contact.

We are all done. Appreciate your time. I know it is a busy time of year. Hope to see you on some of our webinars in the coming months. Thanks everybody, have a great time. Cheers goodbye