All the questions you wanted to ask during GAAD – but didn’t get the chance

Great answering your questions today. There are four of us. I’m Jonathan Hassell I’m CEO of Hassell Inclusion. I’ve got Liam, Yac and Rob from my team with us. We all have a huge amount of experience when it comes to accessibility. Literally you can pretty much ask anything in the whole sphere of accessibility. If we can’t answer your question, that’s a great learning experience for us and we will go off and find answers for you.

So it’s going to be an interesting session between all four of us answering questions that have already been put in the Eventbrite registrations and then your questions in the chat and at the end. We’ve been doing this for a long time. Normally it’s just me doing it in the middle of the summer. This is the number of questions we’ve had each year since 2020 when we started these webinars went up to 775 questions throughout the year in 2025. This is over 2000 questions from people from over 1,500 organisations. So that’s the sort of thing that makes this community, we really do value what you want to know. And if there are things as say that we don’t get around to today or can’t answer today, then that maybe gives us an idea of what we should cover in the future.

We’ve had all sorts of questions over the years, just a few examples. We’ve had stuff on legacy PDFs, captions, awareness and buying comes in a lot how to handle kind of like the value of accessibility, the legal requirements, how to go beyond just kind of websites and apps through to things like hardware, how do we make that accessible? We’ve kept up to date and provided information about what’s changing in things like WCAG but also what’s changing in terms of how people with disabilities use digital tech.

We’ve answered questions on that, and also how to really get AI kind of punching very, very hard. We started answering questions on that in 2024. There are even more in 2026. And as I say, last year there was quite a number of questions about, how do you make this your career? If you love this accessibility thing, how do you kind of move up from somebody who cares about this to somebody who actually kind of does this in their job? Loads of things that we’ve covered. If any of those questions related to what you’re interested in at all, you can find all of those in the recordings on HiHub, so go have a look.

For today, let’s get kicked off. First question from Rasilla, I’m new to accessibility. What would be the best starting points of top tips? That’s an interesting one because it kind of depends on the role. There are many different roles that people play in the creation of digital content and products. It could be you’re a developer, in which case you want stuff to help you understand the technical aspects of accessibility. Could be you’re a manager and you want to understand, is this actually good value for money? Does it kind of make sense?

This is one of the slides from our training summary deck and you can see at the bottom here there are lots of different courses that we run for lots of different people who work and need to put accessibility into their jobs. I asked Rob to pop together a few links from things that he particularly likes just to kind of make this a little bit more tangible. Rob, do you want to take us through these?

ROB: Sure, thanks Jonathan We’ve split this up into sort of four different sections. HSBC have released an accessibility hub to the public to raise awareness, which is really worth your time to go and have a look at that. Microsoft had done some really good stuff on AI, Lots of video content on there. Book of Accessibility is a useful thing for practitioners and more for developers you’ve got Accessibility Toolkit there that you might have heard of. Some guidelines, a couple of things from us, Neurodiversity Guidelines and some inclusion insight posters, which are definitely worth your time. And then gov.uk have put together, you’ve probably seen them some do’s and don’ts for designing for accessibility. So if you’re just starting off, they’re very, very useful. And more on the strategic front, you can win one of Jonathan’s books later in this. And then we have a really useful Buy-In-Toolkit that you should have a look at as well.

JONATHAN: Super-duper, thanks, Rob. We’re going to keep this kind of moving quite quickly. There are obviously loads more things out there for you to kind of look at. If you’ve got a particular favourite that you would like to kind of pop into the meeting chat now, please feel free. Anything that’s particularly kind of helps you on your accessibility journey that would be good. Just my screen has popped off for a second, but there we are back again. If there is anything that you think is missing from our list or really should be the kind of key first port of call for somebody new at this, please feel free to pop it in the chat right now. For the moment I’m going to hand over to Liam. If you want to take the screen, Liam, and take us through. So this is a couple of questions that we’ve got about accessibility and AI. How is AI changing the way accessibility plays? Liam, over to you.

LIAM: Thanks, Jonathan. As Jonathan mentioned, we tend to get a lot of questions on accessibility in AI at the moment. My first point of call is if anyone wants to learn more about it, we did a webinar at the beginning of this year and one last year. I’d highly suggest you go and watch those. There’s a lot more detail in them than we’ve probably got time to cover in this session, but we just wanted to give a quick summary around it.

And what I want to do is, first off, AI has the ability to be completely transformational when it comes to accessibility. It has the ability to take something like one piece of content and provide it in many different views depending on that individual. Maybe you’re sight impaired and you want to resize the text. Maybe you’re dyslexic and you want it in simpler language. Perhaps maybe you’ve got a touch impairment and you want some interactive graphs that are easy to use with the keyboard. It has that possibility to give you what you want, when you want it and how you want it, which obviously benefits users massively and then through that benefits organisations as well.

Improved reach and engagement, propensity to buy possibly. But when we think about AI, we also have to think about where it can go wrong, has this great potential, but at the end of the day, it is still a tool. And it’s how that tool is used that is most important.

If we just look at the recruiting side of the world, Amazon had to cancel their AI driven recruitment tool because it penalised basically resumes that contain the word “woman”. And then HireVue had an automated speech recognition transcripts for interviews. And unfortunately, it disadvantaged those who are non-white native English speakers and for deaf applicants because it was more assessing how well a person spoke in English than the quality of what they’re saying.

We have to be aware of what the great potential it has, but also that it is a tool for us to understand how we can use it. And so we think that there are probably around six areas that you should consider when it comes to digital accessibility and AI.

The first is removing bias in models. If you’re procuring or building, have you made sure that the model has been trained in a diverse a data set that includes people with disabilities? From a decision-making perspective, have you made sure that it is transparent so that you understand how you’re getting to an output, so you understand where accessibility may or may not have been considered? Have you made sure that the AI tool accepts inclusive prompts? For example, does it know what it means when you ask it can you make this in a screen reader friendly output? And then linked to that, if you ask it that question, can it actually provide the output in a screen reader friendly way?

We need to think about both of those. And then the web development world is changing massively at the moment with vibe coding. So how is accessibility fitting into that? Developers using all these different tools, but we need to make sure that accessibility is embedded in them.

And then the tool itself has to be accessible. It’s all well and good, everything else being inclusive, but if a person can’t actually access that tool, then there’s a problem. And we have to be understanding where the balance is in all of this, because they can go wrong. Google Gemini wanted to eliminate racial bias by ensuring representation in images. The problem is it started to add in diverse people and historical images that weren’t necessarily there. And so we have to be thinking about how we balance both the accuracy of the tool, but also making sure that it is inclusive and accessible.

And so you might be sitting, they’re thinking, Liam, OK, well, which tool do we use then? And one of the resources that I wanted to share was this one developed by the GAAD Foundation and ServiceNow. If you’ve not seen, it’s called AIMAC, it’s the AI Model Accessibility Checker. What it does is it takes basically some of the most commonly used AI models out there and has a look to see how accessible the output is. So perhaps go and have an investigation, see where your tool or the tool you’re thinking of buying might fit into all of this. But the summary is AI has great potential, but we need to be aware of how it’s being used to make sure that it’s inclusive for everybody. So that was a question on AI.

I’m going to completely change our track a little bit. Emma asked a question about how you can make the wider company care about accessibility and how you get that senior leadership buy in. And I’m going to come at it from one way and then I’m going to hand over to Rob, who’s going to come at it from a different angle.

The way that I like to start off things, we want to build motivation and understanding. And I think the best way you can do that every time is by putting someone in front of an individual with disability and hearing their stories. Once you hear an individual say, I was stripped of my independence because this wasn’t accessible. When you hear that individual say, I spent 20 minutes really looking forward to buying something and at the very end I couldn’t, that’s when it starts to click for people because that’s when they start making the emotional connection with people for accessibility. So they think, oh my God, I remember the experience. Not oh accessibility is this cost in this compliance process.

And so if you’re wondering about how you can start off on that, we’ve got a couple of webinars that you can watch which actually involve talking to people with different disabilities about how they want to be interacted with and how they work. And then also, as Rob mentioned at the beginning, we also have our Buy-In-Toolkit. And the reason I wanted to share this is because one of the things we have to do in accessibility is move it from compliance and technical to a programmer of behaviour change.

Once you understand the benefits and are able to align those to the different individuals and different people in the organisation, the organisational goals, that’s when you start getting movement because people stop thinking of accessibility being the barrier to achieving what they want, but actually being the enabler to getting to where they want. Rob, I’m just going to pass it over to you to continue that line of thought.

ROB: Sure, thanks, Liam. I’m going to talk to you about awards, using awards as a mechanism to increase the budget for your accessibility programme. What you’re looking at here is a wall of awards that we’ve helped clients win, the most recent one being Forbes Accessibility 200 there. And what I’ve found is actually the process of entering an award is really, really valuable to an organisation because what it does is, it galvanises pockets of accessibility stuff that’s going on within the organisation that often is siloed and you don’t hear about. It’s a way of bringing all that together. And of course, entering an award is something that reporting up to senior leadership is great for your programme.

This is an example of ServiceNow who won the Netty award last year. That’s them putting the comms out around the award. They won quite a few last year. So they were doing this quite often. They won it for the best use of AI and they’ve really found that promoting this wider than just within the organisation, it shows their peers as well that they actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to accessibility. If you’re interested in awards, feel free to just drop me a message in the chat and I’ll be happy to follow up with you on that.

The next question comes from Tracy and she says where to focus when resources are tight. Things are changing very quickly in the positions we’re in already trying to find more and better ways to be efficient, which includes resources and costs. How can we do this effectively and continue to give back high quality support for our staff members, stakeholders and the general public while keeping within the boundaries of our policies and processes? Quite a long question. Let’s have a go at this.

Accessibility defects found at the end of the process are over 600 times more expensive to fix. And I’ve had personal experience of this where you think that it’s, oh, it’s a small accessibility change, it must be OK then. But the process of amending a platform is often very, very time consuming. It has to go through various different rounds of testing before. So finding defects very, very early in the design phase is much, much more efficient. One thing that you should really be considering is what we call an accessibility log. And this is making decisions around accessibility that we understand that there might be an issue, but we’ve made a decision to do X or Y. We have some training coming up with Jonathan. I’ll touch on later on around which would teach you how to do this effectively within your organisation.

The next thing you have to do is prioritise. You’re not going to be able to fix every issue that you find. So understanding what to prioritise is really, really important, and how do you do that? You’re not looking for perfection. What you’re looking for is to look at the most used high impact journeys and be looking to fix issues within those first. And then once you’ve become a little bit more mature, using a design system to actually, so you’re not repeating every single the same thing every single time. And it’s how you can, as a small team punch a lot harder in the organisation, giving people the actual components and design resources that they need to be able to fix this stuff. I think this is back to you Yac.

YAC: What we’re going to do is talk about this question then, and this is all about how we can make our documents more accessible. We’ve covered some of this on previous webinars around all sorts of documents, but especially on PDF documents. The most important thing here is for many countries internationally, in Europe and the UK PDFs are touch points along a customer journey. And if any of those are inaccessible, then effectively that can break accessibility. It can be, in the worst-case scenario, something that you’re challenged on legally. The most important thing on making documents accessible is to first of all, understand your users. And then secondary to that is to understand the journeys those users are going on. And again, assessing the touch points.

To make your documents accessible what you’re always trying to do is understand how people are getting to them, whether that’s social media, through e-mail or marketing. So that’s the beginning of the journey. The middle point is obviously the document itself, but also consider what you need to do at the end point, whether you need to send that document back to someone in the case of a form, whether someone is printing that off in the case of, let’s say, ticketing with QR codes, whether someone needs to copy and paste from that document in the case of things like bank statements.

Just as a quick aside, I’m just going to share quickly a report that was done by some colleagues of mine in the Cabinet Office. Anyone who is in the public sector in the UK may be aware that on the PSBAR you can now be effectively audited. I’ve stripped this report back massively, but what we’ll notice as we go through this is the Cabinet Office team are specifically now looking at PDF documents and they’re assessed as the overall customer journey. The same is true of the European Accessibility Act as well. If you have PDFs which are auto generated or you’re creating them as forms for people to fill in, they need to be accessible.

We always want to reward good inclusion, but unfortunately if they’re wrong then they can lead to legal challenge. What we have on screen is just a couple of examples in the UK where there is now case law for inaccessible documents. Basically someone who tried to complete a document found the PDF was inaccessible. These are just examples of how you can make sure that people are aware of this and they’re prompted to make things more accessible.

Leading on from that then kind of related to documents is how we format things. One of the things sometimes people will do is always try and apply a certain level of branding or a certain level of formatting to documents. Now, in some cases it’s absolutely necessary. So for things like court documents or transcripts from councils, the example on the right shows that you will have to have a tabular format in that each line is numbered so that can be referenced, that can be archived. If that’s the case, then what we can do is basically visually apply the table formatting, but strip that out for screen readers. So it will be read in the correct sequence, but you won’t get all of the, let’s say, verbosity of the table being read out. And if anyone needs any help doing something like that then just let me know.

On the left-hand side though is an example where someone has used tabular formatting to create, let’s say, an application form that’s just not necessary now with common websites. Underneath the screenshot we have a very, very simple read out from a screen reader which is showing you that there’s a huge amount of extraneous and verbose information given, which is just massively confusing when people are trying to listen to whether things are mandatory or required or not. As with the documents before, always understand your users, the user journey, and check why you would need to put things in tables to begin with.

There are specific reasons, but in the case of an application form, it’s probably not necessary. Let’s move on. Last question then, and this is all about making sure that people understand how good design can work. One of the things I get a lot when I train people or I do live audits is people thinking that accessibility effectively has to be boring to work. Now, I’m going to be completely honest, I worked on Gov UK for many, many years. It is very, very boring as a site. We’ve got a screenshot there on the left of that. I’ll just bring this up. The reason it’s designed in this way is for very specific purposes. It’s been iterated, it’s been customised, it’s very, very accessible, but it’s not the most interesting site in the world.

There is no reason your site has to look like this. With the advent of new technologies, new browsers, you can have something like the Apple site which is equally accessible. We’re not going to go through this in massive depth, but if we were to run an automated tool across the Apple site, you can see that errors wise there are none. This isn’t perfect. I’ve checked this manually as well and this is a very, very accessible site on par with Gov UK. But I think we’ll all agree branding wise, interactive wise, colour wise, it’s a lot more, let’s say, appealing than Gov UK.

Likewise, there are sites now like the Porsche site that have background animation that we can actually change. They have AI tooling. And again, if we run WAVE on this very quickly, we’ll see that this has no WCAG errors. One more thing for the Porsche site before we finish is not only is this looking at very, very kind of branded information, very interactive information, they are also incorporating things like AI into this. So we can see in this section, we’ve got a little AI tool that lets us ask questions on that. And I’m just going to put something in here. I’m picking my daughter up from uni this weekend. She’ll have loads and loads of stuff to bring back for her. So what I want to do is understand how well this tool can give me accessible results and it will provide me with some variation on different cars I can buy. And it’s very, very accessible. We’ve got keyboard focus, accessibility, good structure.

This just shows you, you can have very branded sites, very colourful interactive sites, with AI prompts that are still fantastically accessible. We don’t need to set up for let’s say a monotonous, boring, unappealing sites. I will just pause there and hand back.

ROB: Thanks, Yac. We’ve got a question here from Jade. What’s the best way to approach agencies who have been commissioned to do work for us and state they can meet accessibility requirements and then you get the end product which is not reflect that, leading to much back and forth and delays.

This is something I have a lot of personal experience of working on a lot of projects. And what I found was that you have to try and get the right people in the room. If you get into the situation where they have delivered a product, typically you’ll be speaking to the product owner or project manager from the agency. They tend to be a little bit more protective of their developers, but what I’ve found is it’s often a training gap. The developer might not have been trained as much or understood the initial requirements of the product they’re building.

Typically they’re working with a client on multiple different projects and developers do vary. But as soon as I found I’ve managed to get them, on a call and get them into the loop, things tend to move a lot quicker. The back and forth can be, if you’re going through somebody else such as a project manager, things can often get lost in translation. So the accessibility person talking to the actual developer really, really does help. But obviously the best way is not to get into that situation. Jonathan is going to talk a little bit now about how you actually, sort of fix this upstream next time. Learn from that, certainly as an agency so that they’re asking the right questions. So it actually sits within procurement.

JONATHAN: Thanks, Rob. So this is, it’s a complex area. There’s so many ways that organisations can get this wrong, both on the supplier side and the kind of the vendor side and the sort of client side. A very famous multinational tool vendor came to us and said, we do accessibility. But people ask us is our product accessible? To which the answer is, well, it’s kind of accessible, but it’s not 100%. And certainly in the past what organisations have done to try and make this more of a legal responsibility.

So when you rely on a third party to create something for you or you are buying their platform to create something from, often times procurement teams actually didn’t ask any questions at all. And if they did, then maybe the next thing was, can you give us your VPAT, if it was a product like Zoom or something like that. How accessible is this if we’re going to use this product rather than a different one?

Obviously if somebody is creating something for you, there is no VPAT yet. There is no proof when you actually sort of commission that organisation to do it. But even then, a lot of the time, that disappointing feeling where somebody creates something for you and maybe you’ve got a staff member who has a disability who wants to use this and looks at it and says, yeah, they said it was fine, but actually it’s not. And oftentimes as well, if somebody is creating, say a website for you, they need to make sure that you can keep it accessible if you started off that way. So making sure that accessibility is there in a content management system for adding new pages for a website, that sort of thing.

If you’re HSBC who is a huge client of ours, you kind of train and mentor your vendors to get this right. Because if they can’t get it right, you can’t be the organisation that you want to be. Most organisations though, haven’t thought about how to make sure that they’ve tightened up the way they work with their suppliers.

So just a few notes on that from my experience over the years. Success in this area is really clarity of communication and what’s there in the contract. A lot of organisations say we want something to be accessible, but actually they don’t really mean it. It’s something that they have to ask for. But actually, agencies have gotten used to the fact that often times that’s one of those things that if they can’t deliver it, it is probably OK. It’s not really.

Here’s an example from when I was at the BBC. It was my job to set in place the standards and guidelines for all of the what was 400 different HSBC, sorry, BBC websites. And we had a new website that was created by a third-party agency from a part of, the BBC that didn’t really normally do digital, which was the HR kind of teams, the jobs teams. We’ve created all of these guidelines for all of the people who did news and sports of all of the different things, iPlayer, they all knew how to do accessibility right.

The HR people haven’t got a clue. But they knew they needed a career site, so they commissioned one, but they never asked about accessibility. It went up to the day before it was going to go live. Nobody knew they were doing this. They asked us to check it out and it was awful. It was absolutely dreadful. It was one supplier and they had subcontracted it out to another supplier, but it didn’t actually do accessibility or for that matter look like the rest of the BBC site in the way it should have done.

If we compare that to one of my places where I won lots of awards when I was at the BBC, something called BBC Jam, it was online learning for kids via games. We had 25 different suppliers and each one of them had to do accessibility. It was my job to make sure that happened and we sorted that day one. We put in place the requirements and they were very clear that they were not going live unless they actually delivered this stuff.

The key things, if you are thinking, yeah we’d love to kind of help our suppliers, but they just don’t seem interested, well, you need to make sure that they are by putting it in procurement, putting it in your ITT. If you’re asking a company to create something for you, ask questions about accessibility before deciding that they’re the right people, put it in the contract. So if they don’t get it right, they don’t get the money for it and check their compliance in terms of their competence. Have they done this before? Their teams know what to do and check what you paid for.

It’s really, really easy for organisations to sort of do the wrong thing and hope that they can get away with it. One of the great things about this particular question was that this person knew that their supplier had let them down. Lots of times we’ve been in situations where companies have been dependent, relying on their suppliers to do the right thing. The suppliers have said all of the right things, but actually they’ve not been doing it. But the company didn’t know, so they were actually in a legal situation themselves because their website wasn’t accessible. It wasn’t their fault, but it was their suppliers fault, but they hadn’t checked. So make sure it’s there in the in the thing.

If you’re in a situation where a supplier says we’re just not going to do it. You didn’t ask about accessibility in the thing. Maybe it’s not in the contract. So therefore, we don’t have to do this. There’s a number of things that you can do. You can see if there’s some sort of like legal situation that you can put them into, specifically, if you’ve bought something and you’re subscribing to a Software as a Service, for example, and it’s not as accessible as you want, you can say, well, we’re just going to move suppliers if you don’t do this right. Can you get out of that contract? If they don’t give you what you want, you don’t necessarily need to do that, but being able to threaten that is a useful thing.

And are there any other reasons you can give them to give you what you want? You know, a lot of the time what we find is that most organisations who are creating say something like a Software as a Service don’t really know that they need to do accessibility. And the first time they get aware of that is when one of their clients says you’re not doing what we need you to do. And actually that should be something that the supplier takes on board, you’ve tested their products and it’s not good enough. Well, you’ve done half their job for them if you like. So actually they can go the rest of the way and fix things, that sort of thing.

Even if you haven’t got the ability to do what HSBC do and say we’re going to train you because you obviously don’t know what you’re doing and we’re going to help you get to a point where we get what we need. Most organisations aren’t in that point, but you can put it in your procurement. Key thing here, there’s a QR code on the screen here. If there’s any information you want to help your procurement people help you get what you need, then that’s there.

Few more questions that I can answer and then we’ve got some time for questions at the end. Emma was asking about resources to help with training employees. Yeah, we all need sort of resources that can help train people. The best resources that can help train people is training. And here is something that we hope is going to be helpful for a lot of you.

So there’s a QR code here on the screen and also a link there for you to contact us. We have free training coming up that is sponsored by HSBC, so you don’t have to pay a single thing for it. HSBC love our training so much. They started off getting us to train their team so that they could get accessibility right. They then realised that we should be training their vendors as well. So they opened up the training to their vendors and they then realised that actually it was just good for the world, if you like, for other organisations to be able to get some free accessibility training as well. There are 100 spaces on all of our courses.

Of these five of the courses that we run that are sponsored by HSBC, you can book in for those. If you’ve got people who are web developers who want some training, UX designers, it could be content people, people who actually do testing for you, maybe a QA tester who wants to know how to include accessibility in that. And also for people who are working on the business analysis and project management sides, we can help them with our free training too. Please feel free contact us, we have training sessions coming up and hopefully what that might do is to help you, or those organisations that may be failing you and not giving you what you need at the moment, that might be just one of those ways you could help go forwards.

Final question before we open up to some of the questions that you’ve been asking in the chat. This was a question asked of me by the team. As I say, I’ve handed over most of the session to them. They wanted me to talk about, what’s the future of accessibility. There’s so much change happening at the moment. What is going to change? What is going to stay the same? Is there something that I can say that may help some of you?

We’re helping a lot of organisations at the moment through the transition to AI. It is not something that everybody is finding easy, something that some organisations are really resisting, other organisations are embracing wholeheartedly and a lot of accessibility people are wondering which side of that they should be on. If Vibe coding is enabling us to make our applications, our websites so much quicker, do we get accessibility for free or not? Should we be saying yes to this or not? That’s the sort of thing I’m going to look at here.

Back in 2024, this was a slide that I presented on it in my trends. So I was looking at what was coming down the path and this is the future that’s kind of arriving at the moment. The idea that Google have now decided that rather than you putting in your search term it finding loads of links and you go into lots of different websites, that it would take a lot of the stuff from those websites and actually try and give you the answer from a lot of different sources into one place without you needing to do very much work. That’s just one example of Agentic AI where agents can take your query, the thing that you need to do, it could be to create a whole new website or to work out what the cheapest holiday in Cyprus is and take that and say, OK, I’m going to go out there to the world, find the best information about that, especially knowing the user.

So a personal knowledge of the user. For example, this particular user uses a wheelchair. So if there are any airlines that have a bad reputation for damaging wheelchairs in transit, let’s not include those in our suggested answers. And then all of that can come through again in another way. If you recall Liam’s slide about how AI can be very good and actually taking information in one format and putting it in another format. It could be that you want all of those answers to be delivered to you in a video, or it could be an audio that you can listen to when you’re jogging. Or it could be that actually you want a table that you can quickly go through and say, I want that one, press a button and it will go off and buy all of that stuff for you.

That’s where we are going in digital, whether we like it or not. So what we need to do is to work out how accessibility plays in this sort of world and a few thoughts on that. The first thing there is context. So context is massively important. Here’s an example. Every morning I take our dog for a walk and halfway around the walk I normally kind of think, oh, there’s that thing I really should do. I’ve not got my hands free to be able to type on the keyboard. So I bring up Otter.ai and I burble into it. Remember to do that thing when I get back to my computer, it’s taken that it’s transcripted it, I can put it into my action list and invariably it gets half of the stuff. Well, maybe not half the stuff, but at least 10% of the stuff that I said wrong. It doesn’t understand me, and I do it every single morning. So every single day I correct it. Words that are in my vocabulary that aren’t in its vocabulary, it gets wrong all of the time.

It doesn’t understand what I talk about and what I want. And you would hope that it would fix that. And especially in a world where we’re all using Fireflies and all the rest of it to try and get meeting transcripts and all of the rest of it. If it can’t understand me, one person with one agenda and one load of things that I normally talk about, how can it really be totally accurate to understand maybe five people in a meeting who may not even be particularly sort of speaking like now, but actually screaming at each other because they disagree with each other intensely.

There is stuff in here about context. We need to make sure that these technologies work better for us. So context, I believe is something for accessibility. If we can get context, if we can get that into these tools, that’s really good. It’s, for example, what’s been in Dragon naturally speaking for a very long time. You train it to your voice and your vocabulary. We need that there.

We also need to be looking at purpose, for example, audio description. So getting a video described to somebody who’s blind is not something that most people do, even though it’s part of WCAG. Well, what you can do now is you can go to Google AI Studio, play it a video and say what was happening in that video and it will tell you what things look like, but it won’t tell you the purpose of that video.

This is an example that I gave last year in the marketing space. This this was an organisation winning awards at an award ceremony. And the AI Studio did a really, really good job of saying it was an award ceremony, but that wasn’t the point of the video. The purpose of the video was they won, this organisation, won this particular award. That was the only reason the video was there. These are the sorts of things that we’re looking at going to the future, having AI kind of work better like this for us.

If this doesn’t sound like accessibility, it really, really is, but it’s accessibility in maybe a very different way from, is this website WCAG compliant. If that’s where we’re going in terms of how accessibility needs to change, what’s not going to change? And I’m going to use an example here from a guy called Jensen Huang.

If you don’t know him, he’s the CEO of Nvidia, otherwise known as the people making all of the money from the hardware that runs all of these large language models. So this guy has got more money than most people in the world if they don’t work for Apple or Google or Amazon. And this was one of the things that he started talking about in December and now he’s everywhere. We’re working into a world where intelligence is just there. It’s a normal thing. The thing that makes us different, the thing that the computers can’t do is what he calls taste.

So taste is the ability to look at infinite options and instantly identify what matters and most importantly what doesn’t. So on that video of people the awards do, what matters is not it’s an awards do, but who is winning the award? You see what I mean? Or for that matter we need a new accessibility tool to make accessibility cheaper for us to run. We had Rasila asking for how do I check the accessibility of websites? There are hundreds of automated accessibility testing tools out there at the moment. There’s more and more all of the time.

The hard question is which one is going to be best for you or which one of those Vibe coding sort of tools is going to give you the most accessible thing. That’s what he calls taste and that’s the thing that is not going to change. So we need to be getting good at saying it’s not just about WCAG, it’s about what should we do in this circumstance to get the most accessible outcome. I’ve mentioned and some of my colleagues have mentioned sort of training and, and various things. We have product manager training coming up, managing accessibility rather than doing accessibility, making sure that your developers have got their HTML right, that’s kind of less important going forwards as to did we pick the right tool? Did we pick the right technology, that sort of thing. This is where we’re going.

So it’s probably a good idea for you to get some training in that. There’s free training there that you can get from us. What we are here for is to try and make sure that what the computers can’t do, what the AI can’t do, but what requires humans is still happening. For example, including people with disabilities and co-design there are lots of new tools being created for people with disabilities. If they are not being created with people in disabilities, they are pointless.

That’s the first thing is just to make sure that if you are creating a product, you really need to make sure that you include humans in its design because humans will be used at some point to actually use this thing. Making sure that accuracy, nuance and purpose are there. And then final thing is it’s all of the soft stuff.

What we’ve got is lots of handbrake turns from some of the biggest and most powerful people on the planet at the moment. So the tech Bros, this is Sam at OpenAI saying actually, I thought nobody was going to have a job. Maybe I’m wrong. Actually. People like people. People like working with people, actually working with people and getting accessibility coming out of all of the different layers of what people do to make a product and promote a product and make it successful is one of those things that I think is massively important going forward. If you are thinking, I can’t do accessibility because I don’t understand that bit of WCAG, if you can understand how to bring people with you, then you’re probably in for a good ride going forwards.

Some time for some questions. First one I wanted to ask came from Keilani, anyone from our team. She was asking about accessibility dashboards. So dashboards that are offered by a lot of companies to kind of say how accessible various different websites are, are these useful for leadership? Can you trust them? How best do you use these to get the right messages to the right people and anyone in our team want to unmute and answer that one?

YAC: Yeah, I think they’re useful to a point Jonathan, the problem with a lot of the dashboards I see, let’s pick on someone like Silktide or Call site or Tenon is they’re very, very much focused on does it pass certain WCAG criteria and then giving you a score about compliance. They don’t focus on overall user journeys. So even if you fail a number of WCAG success criteria, you can still have a site that people can use and is very, very usable and people like. Conversely, you can have a site that is fully WCAG compliant, has a really, really great score, but it’s virtually unusable because it’s making inferences on people’s IT literacy. It’s very, very poor usability wise.

The actual kind of data visualisation itself are invariably inaccessible for colour contrast, non-text contrast, they don’t have suitable alt text. So what you’re trying to achieve is to work out what your users need and then somehow having the metric that you can report on, like how well people feel about that, how complete your transactions are, how many new customers you’re onboarding as opposed to a score against specific WCAG. And generally that works better for the return on the investment and acquiring more budget.

JONATHAN: Absolutely, love that Yac. It’s about the impact. It’s not about the WCAG. Edward was asking a really interesting question. So a number of people were saying thank you so much for the Train 1000 training, the free training that we’re doing with HSBC. People seem to be really loving those. Edward’s question was the main challenge is still encouraging other staff to take up the opportunities when they’re available. Rob, Liam, either of you, any ways of trying to encourage people to free up their time to actually do training?

ROB: I think organisations should be encouraging employees that when they’ve upskilled themselves, it’s part of their end of year review. What have you done this year? I’ve upskilled myself in inaccessibility, which is valuable to their organisation. Understanding that if you do take up this training, you do spend the time upskilling yourself, then it’s making you more employable in the future, which I think is a great thing and, helping you potentially get on within the organisation by showing initiatives there.

JONATHAN: Absolutely. That’s good. Thanks, Rob. Anyone, are there any good overlay accessible overlay systems out there? Discuss.

YAC: I was just answering that actually. So really good timing. Yeah, there are loads and loads of really good ones, too many to name. The key thing here is there isn’t one overlay which is best for everyone. You’re all thinking about your customers. If you have people who are more cognitively impaired and visually impaired, maybe Recite Me is a great overlay for you. If you have a website which is very transactional and depends a lot on forms, then maybe a different type of overlay that supports things like summarisation, picture dictionaries and cognitive impairments in a different way would be a lot more accessible.

Always think that overlays are useful and can support people with IT literacy issues. They are not a sticking plaster for inaccessible websites. And the worst overlays I’ve just mentioned this, make false promises. That’s a whole webinar in itself. And some of them are actually facing legal challenges at the moment for promising they’ll fix websites when they won’t against things like 508, ADA and the UK Equality Act. But if anyone needs any more info on that, just let us know and we can help.

JONATHAN: We have a whole webinar. If you go onto HiHub and tap in overlay, you’ll find we did a webinar on this a little while ago, which differentiates between if you like that good and that bad that Yac was talking about there. Go have a look at that. Well, hopefully we have been able to answer, a fair amount of your questions today.

If there are things here that were useful for you, then please feel free to kind of share things. If you want to come back to this and kind of go, I know they said something interesting but I missed it first time. This will be up on a HiHub in about a week’s time. It’ll also have captions and transcript. If English isn’t your first language and you like that transcript in your language, you can cut and paste that into Google Translate and suddenly you’ve got our webinars in whatever language you use. So hopefully that will be helpful.

We’ve got some up more upcoming webinars and next month we’re going to be looking more at the strategic side of things, how to make sure that things that block accessibility programmes happening can be cleared. And then in July we’re also going to be looking at kiosks. Parts of the European Accessibility Act is that it’s not just your websites and your apps that are accessible. Say, for example, you’re a retailer and you’ve got a kiosk that people can use to buy tickets and things like that, that needs to be accessible as well. So we’ve got more on that coming.

And if you have more questions that we haven’t been able to answer today, we have another free way of you getting these and not having to wait for the next webinar or time we do this. We have something called HiBot which is, yes, it’s one of those kind of chatbots that has been trained on accessibility. But this is the quote from somebody who’s been to a lot of our webinars. I don’t know if on the call today, with the right prompts this can be a great tool for organising thoughts and determining what you need or what you don’t need to focus on. Co-pilot, so this is Microsoft, has pulled from outdated and just plain wrong responses. The same is true for Google Search which pulled specifically from content I knew was outdated or not relevant to my specific case. This feels more reliable.

A key thing, it’s that taste everyone wants to get accessibility right. And lots of people out there are selling this stuff. Some of the things that the public tools pull from are trying to sell stuff to you and they could be from years ago. Our HiBot allows you to get stuff as if you were talking to one of us because it’s been trained on my books and all of these webinars. You can ask it all sorts of different questions.

For example, here’s HiBot on our site. I asked us that question about about approaching agencies that could be commissioned and they kind of got it wrong and it came up with some really, really good thoughts there for you to do. This thing really, really helpful, totally free. You just need to be a HiHub member, which is free, and you can just go in and use HiBot to your heart’s content. That’s one free thing.

The last free thing is that if you like the audio version of the first of my two books, then because it’s GAAD or around GAAD, we’re making this available free as well, there is a QR code there on the screen for you to go to the place where you can download that. We hope that this has been a really useful session for you. If you have more questions and you want to ask them via e-mail, contact@hassellinclusion.com would be a great place to do that.

Thank you so much for your time today. I hope that’s demystified some of those things that might have been questions that you had at the start of the session. There is another of our webinars coming along in a month’s time, if that sounds like it might be useful for you, please feel free to come along for that.

As I say if you’ve got questions, send them to us in the meantime. But otherwise, I hope you’ve really enjoyed the hour. I’m sure it’s been a useful time for you and look forward to hearing from you or seeing you on one of our webinars in the future. Thanks everybody and have a great day. Thanks. Bye bye.