Everything you wanted to know about Accessibility.
Live Q&A with Jonathan Hassell

JONATHAN: I’m Jonathan Hassell, CEO of Hassell Inclusion, I’m going to be the main person speaking, I’ve got Pete with me who is going to be giving you a mechanism to get some more answers to questions in an ongoing way, at the end. I also have Rob and Usman from my team here as well. So if I’m not answering the question that you really want to ask, please pop it in the chat and one of my team will do their best to try and give you an answer to that question.

As I say we are recording this, it is going to go up on HiHub, once we’ve got the transcript and captions sorted. We have live, onscreen captions for this, you can turn them on in Zoom. Or there is a link in the chat already to where you can get those captions in whatever format you would like. And if you stay to the end, yes there is a little bit of a free present that you can get. So lets get into this.

So, my name’s Jonathan Hassell, I’ve been doing this accessibility thing for a very, very long time, which is why my hair is getting greyer and greyer. I’m going to be answering a lot of your questions. I have Pete with me, who is going to be doing something at the end, as I say, the rest of the team please pop your questions in the chat. We would love to give you answers to everything that you want to ask.

So, we’ve been doing this for a while now. We wanted to look back and see, if you like, what sort of questions people have been asking, who’s asking them over the years. We’ve had nearly 1600 people from over 1200 organisations asking questions since we started these webinars in 2020. It’s going up every year, accessibility is becoming more and more popular and this is a great place to learn about it. So, thank you. You know, you make this community what it is.

We’re sorry we can’t unmute you all so that you can speak to each other, but the chat is great for doing that. You can chat with each other as well as people from our team. Top themes over the years. There’s always been stuff about accessibility legislation, about audits, about making sure that we can understand people so we can give them great user experiences. More increasingly, we’ve been doing stuff about AI, there’s always been stuff about assistive tech, how to improve your skills around accessibility, your marketing, understanding of diversity. Yeah, it goes on and on and lots of different questions over the years. You know, if we look back to last year, you can see AI creeping into everyone’s thoughts, I’m sure it’s foremost in yours this year or certainly of your colleagues.

So, there will be a section this year as well on AI as well. But the things that I’ve pulled out, so I’m not going to answer all the questions that people ask, when they registered. That would take us the next three hours at least. What I’ve done is I’ve selected questions and I have put them into themes. So, this hangs together for you and we’re not jumping around all the time. We’re looking at ethics and we’re going to look at how do you get started in accessibility?

Getting buy-in. How to get going with this as your career. Handling clashes between accessibility and different things was an interesting topic that came up with various questions. We will look at that. Yes, there is stuff on AI. There’s going to be some stuff on vendors and how to maintain accessibility over time. And no, I’m not going to be answering your questions this month about the European Accessibility Act. We have a whole webinar next month which is devoted just to that. So, I’m going to take those questions that people asked and hold them until then.

So, let’s get going. So, the first section is about people with lived experience. And here’s the first question. This came from Alison: It would be interesting to know about the current practices to ask customers about special needs, vulnerabilities and how to manage this captured information ensuring a smooth customer experience and seamless journey where people feel valued and respected. I couldn’t agree more. And we’re doing a lot to help organisations with this at this very moment.

Some of the things that we do at Hassell Inclusion to help on this side is we do customer service training and have been doing for years. A lot of people experience people who have a disability initially through somebody actually calling them and saying, I can’t use your website. I can’t use your app. How would this work? That sort of thing. We have done a lot with organisations on how to engage with people who may have a disability. The key thing here really is that when you’re actually trying to help someone out, the question is – do you really need to know if they have a disability? Often times, when somebody is contacting you because they’re having difficulty using something, that difficulty itself can be the thing that you really need to focus on.

So, it becomes really important to make sure, because you can’t see a lot of disabilities. The people on that top row there, all have very visibility disabilities. Andrea Bocelli, people like Michael J Fox. A lot of people with disability you may never know. It isn’t required for you to know that. You really need to know how to help someone. And often times, when we help people on customer service it’s about saying – what information do you actually need to allow you or your colleagues to understand the issue that someone’s got, maybe to reproduce that as well and to get them an answer to what they need.

We have access needs and we have conditions and disabilities. Some people might say I’m blind and I can’t do this. Other people might say I was using your website with jaws and I experienced this difficulty. Either way, it’s really more about trying to work out how to help the person rather than putting them in, if you like, a disability box, except for one reason.

So, here in the UK, we have a lot of requirements around vulnerability from some of our regulators. So, some organisations actually have to count the number of people who are vulnerable they help. Sometimes it is OK for you to say the question that you’ve got, the difficulty that you have, is that due to some sort of condition that you have, rather than just asking about, if you like, someone’s access needs. We’ve done a lot of work in this area. Hopefully that gives you a little bit of an idea about how to do this stuff. The main place we answer these sorts of questions is in a webinar that we did, I think about a year ago now, May last year, around vulnerability. So, if you want more depth on that, please go there. As I say, if you have a camera phone, those QR codes on the screen will enable to you find all the places you’re after.

Here’s Bethany, a matter of ethics and nothing about us without us. In what sense do experts with no life experience, so, you know, how should they question the professional integrity of their practices? A quite interesting question. So, the question, I guess, here is – how will you know whether or not you have accessibility right if you don’t have a lived experience of the conditions that we’re talking about? How can you really be an expert in something you’re not, if you like? And we totally agree with part of what Bethany is asking about, which is that it’s really, really good to make sure that you involve people with disabilities and older people, for that matter, in the way you are working.

Some stuff that we’ve done just to give you some examples of that: We’ve done a huge amount of work with people who are neurodiverse, defining things that are missing when WCAG missed their needs, if that’s useful for you, there’s a QR code for that. We’ve presented on these webinars, videos of lived experience of somebody who is autistic and somebody who is older. Again, categories of disability that aren’t particularly well understood in those guidelines that are there from WCAG.

Last month we talked about how to make sure that you can involve people with disabilities in user research or testing. We are really committed to what Bethany is after. The interesting thing here, and it’s really worth stating this, is accessibility isn’t just disability. From our perspective, it takes a team normally to really understand how to make accessibility happen, if you like, the lived experiences of people that we want to include aren’t just those with people with disabilities. Yeah, we want to know what people with disabilities need or prefer, but we also know from having done lots of research with people with disabilities that not everybody who has the same condition has the same needs.

When we worked with a lot of people for our neurodiversity guidelines, comments like, if you’ve asked one person with autism, you’ve asked one person. You know it’s a spectrum. People want different things. Trying to bring needs together so that we can understand them is really useful. Similarly, if the idea of getting those needs is to work out how to actually make them work with digital tech, it’s really important that we bring in people who understand technology as well and also, people who understand teams and how to get this involved in the processes so that people creating products not only know what to do, but have time to do it.

The last thing, and you’re going to see this from us a lot of the time, all the way through this session, strategy comes into this as well. Put simply, if your boss doesn’t allow you the time to think about accessibility, you won’t be delivering it to anybody. So, all of these things, if you like, come together. Everybody has different lived experiences, things that they’re an expert in. And we need all of this expertise if we’re going to do this really well.

So, one example of that, here was a question from Anna. This is all about retrospective alt text, basically, it’s scientific journal articles being published. There are images in them and alt text needs to be created but maybe the person who wrote the article isn’t around to ask. So, could we change the meaning of content if we actually get this wrong? How do we deal with this? Yeah, absolutely right. Sometimes the expertise you’re looking at is the expertise of why is this image here? You know if a picture tells a thousand words, which of those words are important? Why did somebody actually put an image there?

That’s one of the things that actually WCAG is all about. When you are creating alt text for an image, you need to understand the purpose of the image. What it’s trying to convey. If you’re not the person who actually understands the scientific nature of this article, that can be really, really hard. So, you know, our views are always on this one that the best person to actually do the alt text for an image, especially a graph that might mean nothing to you at all, is the person who actually created it in the first place. If you don’t have that person around, then you have to make your best guess. But, this isn’t really about how to be brilliant at accessibility. This is actually about how to be brilliant and understanding what that author actually meant by an article. And that, again, is a different area of expertise completely. So, good luck on that one, Anna, that’s a hard one. Often times try and find the best expert to work out what the purpose of that image is.

We had a number of questions around how do I get started with this, especially if it’s not my full-time job. So, Alyssa was saying it feels a bit overwhelming to develop an accessibility strategy for a product when I don’t have the background learning. Curious about how to do this in a big organisation. What steps need to be taken to get this right in the strategy, either for the organisation or for the product. Now we could spend forever on that, in fact I wrote the international standard on this and we do train people in understanding this in training courses.

So, for example, for a product, our delivering accessible products course is all about trying to work out what makes your product different from somebody else’s and how the accessibility strategy for a product actually depends on things like the audience for it, the devices it’s going to be on, the technology that you’re going to be using. Getting the requirements right for your product is key. Then thinking about how you can get this into the way you actually create that product, putting it into sprints, test, plans, that sort of thing. How you prioritise fixes and how you launch.

Those last three points there are ones that we’re going to touch on in other questions from people. So, if you want more about that sort of stuff, please get in touch with us. Because we’re real experts but it would take far too long to explain that for everybody on a call today. If you want to build strategy for your company, it’s even more complex, if you like. It doesn’t just sit there with things like how do we make our website accessible. It could be your social media, your events, other things that are happening in your organisation. Maybe your policies, your procedures.

So, it can be quite complex. We’ve got a few things that can help you, totally free, so the first one is our accessibility score card. That will enable you to understand what sort of questions you need to ask in your company to know where you’re at, at the moment, and maybe how you should plan to improve accessibility and put together a strategy for that. Now, that score card is able to be used on its own, but we did a whole webinar where we talked people through this a few years ago. Again, there is a link and a QR code on the screen there. If you want to know what an accessibility strategy for your company might be like, I suggest you go and have a look at that. It’s very well worth one hour of your time.

If you would prefer reading about it, here is another QR code to the audio book form of one of my best sellers, inclusive design for organisations. This takes you all the way through this sort of stuff. If that is your question, this is the place to go get it. Totally free. Just pop through to the QR code. It will ask you a few questions about where you are, your e-mail address that sort of thing and send you a copy of that. You can listen to this to your heart’s content.

Final thing, so this is Kathy, she was basically saying – it may be a silly question to ask, but should all companies have a team of accessibility professionals? Or are there some organisations that are maybe too small, you know, we’re all volunteers, it’s not our job, we do it off the side of our desk. That thing we hear often times.

So, you know, what can you do to help? And the key thing is ideally you would be large enough as an organisation to have an accessibility centre of excellence. That’s a great way to bring people together to say how are we going to do this as a resource for our organisation? And again, we did a whole webinar on this in September 2023, so you can find out how to do that there. But the key thing is that if you’re not that organisation, why are you doing this off the side of your desk in the first place? It’s your side hustle, if you like. Accessibility isn’t your job, it’s your passion. Nobody has allowed you to do it as your job yet, because you don’t have the budget or the buy-in for things.

A lot of the things that we’re talking about in the book, and the rest of the webinar today, is to help you to actually get other people buying in, in your organisation. Especially people who have a budget that can actually say yeah, this should be a position in our organisation for accessibility or even a team you know, without the buy-in of people thinking that’s worth doing, then you’re very, very limited in the amount of stuff you can do. You can go to external companies like us and we certainly do help a lot of organisations that have the will, but don’t necessarily have the people or the ability to hire the people to do that.

So, if you are outsourcing to a company, like ours, or any other accessibility company, the key thing is – are they actually in it for you? Or are they in it for themselves? Do they want you to learn how to be better at this so you don’t need them any more? That’s how we define success in accessibility at Hassell Inclusion. We like our clients to not need us any more because they’re now brilliant at this stuff. Again, pros and cons of outsourcing, we have a webinar that we did just on that subject. So, it’s nice to have the idea of getting buy-in. This is the thing that is really going to help accessibility tick where you are. The problem often is that it’s really hard to do. A couple of questions on that.

So, Niki asked what are the low hanging fruit to demonstrate to people who are too busy to do this? Met was asking: What are the powerful small changes that we can do? So, key thing, I really do mean it, it’s really so important for you to get other people coming with you, you know, if you’re trying to do this on your own, if you’re trying to do this in a really cheap way, you will get a certain direction but you won’t actually achieve all of the things you want. We will come back to that. But there are really great guidelines and some resources here, again, totally free, on HiHub, about how to bring people with you, how to speak to your senior people and say – actually, this accessibility thing is good business for us, can we do more in this? Some powerful small changes. I wanted to give you not just an idea of what those might be, but a way of thinking about how to work them out.

So, the key thing is cost benefits. If you’ve got something that helps loads of people so the benefit is huge, and the cost is tiny, then that is a really good place for you to start, if you don’t have very much money or very much buy-in, in your organisation. If we’re looking at video, which is becoming more and more a key media type for people, in the digital world, captions, transcripts are really cheap things to do and they help huge numbers of people. Just to give you an example, that is 17.9 million people who want good captions on their videos. If we compare that, for example, to audio description, so both of these things are WCAG single A things, there are only 460,000 people in the UK who want that. They’re all totally blind. If you can see the video enough to watch it, you wouldn’t need AD.

So, a fewer number of people and it costs a lot more money. If you take that to the extreme, whilst sign language is great and we love it as a cultural thing, from a business case, it’s not a great one. 24,000 people sign in the UK, they have that as their main language and it’s really expensive to do. So, where would you spend your time? Where is your powerful small change? I would suggest it’s captions, because again, not only is it something that helps with accessibility, but it also helps in an era where AI is everywhere with your transcripts enabling AI to do better summaries of what you’ve got, all of these things. So, it’s a great way of saying accessibility actually doesn’t just help people with a disability, it maybe helps all of us. That’s the sort of way we tend to try and get people to think. There is a lot of that if you like, using cost benefits to work out what you should do in our product management training. If that sounded like it might be a useful thing for you, go and have a look there.

Some people were asking about accessibility as a career. What should we do? Here’s a few questions: What’s your number one advice for young professionals to want to work in the space? Jenny asking the same question basically but giving some options, shall I be working out my HTML, WCAG, where should I spend my time? The key thing here, the reason why you saw a superhero on that previous slide very, very quickly, was often times, if you are doing accessibility on your own, you may be brilliant at it. And then you may burn out. It’s something that happens in our industry a lot. A lot of passionate people who haven’t got people around them going with them. You’re trying to drag everybody with you.

What you really want, I would suggest, is to be working in a place where your product managers ask you to do accessibility. Your team members actually know what they need to do. You’re following some sort of user centred design process and accessibility fits in nicely. Maybe you’ve got the ability to not just get accessible designs, guidance, from WCAG from the web but beyond. Maybe you’ve done user research with people with disabilities. That would be great. To be empowered to make sensible decisions around accessibility. To have the freedom to say actually, sometimes we need to do things slightly differently, so personalisation may come into this. To be encouraged to test products for accessibility, ideally alongside usability with real people, that enables people to understand not just why it’s important legally, but why it’s important for people. And to be freed from the possibility of doing everything you can in every product. You need to work out how to make this work for you and make things practical.

Just to give you an example, this is the best guy I know in accessibility in the world his name is Mali Fernando. He runs the HSBC accessibility programme. This is his quote: The best advice Jonathan Hassell ever game me, we’ve been working together for about 12 years now, was think strategic, don’t sweat the accessibility details, which team you can recruit with the money you can secure can do. He asked me, do I need to be an expert in everything? No, you are an expert in politics in HSBC already. You get as many people in the organisation behind accessibility and you will do miles more than if you understand how Jaws works.

So, they’re on a ten-year journey to become the most digitally accessible financial services provider in the world. They’ve got us training people everywhere. They’re delivering the most accessible banking website in most of their markets. But the main thing that Mali did was to say it’s my job to get people behind us. His team when he started was him and me. His team is now over 20 people all over the planet with a huge budget, because he knew that his role was strategic to get people behind him. Because if he could get people behind him, he could get a team to actually work for him, to deliver this stuff. That’s a great way of doing things.

Now, we’re not all strategy people. But if you’re thinking about where should you spend your time, where should you learn most when it comes to accessibility, I think you should think where we’re all at, which is – is AI going to steal my job? So, this is an article from it was 2023, we’ve been looking at this for a long time. You know, why are there so many programmers who can’t find jobs? You know there’s a great shortage of programmers who are excellent. You don’t want to be, if you like, a little bit good at accessibility. You want to be, for want of a better word, dangerous. How do you get there and why should you get there? How do you make sure that AI isn’t going to steal the accessibility job that you just learned how to do?

Well, our suggestion is that it’s about solutions. It’s not, if you like, about like I know a little bit about how to test things. So, solutions in our mind are how do you learn how to train and mentor people around you. Learn how to enable people to get better. It’s not just testing with WCAG. But it’s actually really understanding the needs of people with disabilities. That is never going to go away as a really great skill. It’s all of those strategic things that I was talking about. In comparison, audits, you know, being able to follow WCAG and test things, if there is one place where AI has the potential to steal your accessibility job, it is there.

So, do the people stuff. Do the stuff the AI can’t do and you know, we’ve got loads of amazing people in our team. I thought what is it about our team that is really, really amazing according to our clients? This is one of them. The bottom line is they’ve been awesome to work with. One of their key distinguishing traits, they roll up their sleeves and put in the work, as opposed to other firms who provide suggestions on what you should do. That’s what good looks like. You actually make this stuff happen. That’s what I would suggest. The next question was: WAS certificate. That was the entire question. That was somebody basically saying, the IAAP, they’ve got this certified WAS thing, is that worth doing? And WAS is the web accessibility qualification. The thing we really like about this is it’s actually about doing it.

So, you need to have been doing accessibility, helping people around you get good for three to five years. That’s awesome. What’s not so awesome is that it’s very, very code based, but it’s not code based enough, if you like, it’s saying do you know like most of WCAG from a coder perspective. Certainly, if you are a coder, you don’t need to know most of it. You need to know all of the stuff that is going to give you what you need to be able to create the right code. It’s also the only thing out there for long-term things. It’s not very good for designers or testers. It’s very much based on HTML code. If you’re a designer who’s brilliant at inclusive design, you maybe don’t need to know anything about aria.

So that’s the thing that we don’t like about it quite so much. The way we accredit people is by role. So, it’s not a bad thing to go for. It takes a long time to get there, to WAS, because you need the experience. Our way of thinking about things is it just needs to be a little bit more role specific.

OK, some clashes. That’s what people are asking about. The first one, legal top trumps. I want to make this thing more accessible, but my legal team say I can’t change it at all. What do you do? That’s what Pete was asking. Do we have any experience? Yeah, loads. Especially when it comes to terms and conditions. You know, this is where the lawyers say well these are the terms and conditions. You can’t change this at all. Here is the way Google have done it, if you want to sign up for Gmail.

So, the license we give you is worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty free, personal and non-assignable. If you don’t understand the terms. They actually say, which means this, which means this, which means this. That’s one of the largest companies in the world showing you how to do it. So, what we’ve done is we’ve said to people, hey, Google’s lawyers actually write in things, in language that people understand. Hey, and they’re also legal. Maybe you want to do that. So, it’s just a little hint from our experience of pushing back at impenetrable legal language. It doesn’t need to be like that.

Where do we stand if the content we serve users is fully accessible, but the ads we serve are not? That’s what Dave wanted to ask. The interesting thing here is that I don’t think your users actually care. If I’m watching a TV show, and I don’t like the ads, I don’t really care because it’s the show that I’m after. So, if there is a page with banners on it that aren’t particularly accessible, they just haven’t sold very well to me, as a user. I don’t care at all.

So, from an accessibility perspective from the user’s perspective, who cares. From the message perspective in terms of the people who spent all of their time creating the banners to get a message across to make somebody do something and buy something, that’s a real fail. So, here’s some stuff that we do in our marketing creatives, trying to get people who do advertising, to understand that hey, if Amazon do stuff like this, with a lot of less shouting, than Mr Vegas does for example, a lot of people who are dyslexic really dislike loads of capital letters, then do you really think that Amazon don’t know what they’re doing in this space? Really interesting examples there. And some really interesting things, so HSBC, amazing at accessibility. Some of their adverts are a little bit challenging from an accessibility perspective.

So, there’s some interesting conversations that have been had there. If you’re into marketing, it’s about getting your message across, to as many people as possible. Why would you want to exclude people from actually buying the stuff you’re trying to flog? So, marketing creatives training, if that sounds like something that would be useful for people in your organisation. How do we balance between the needs of pushing features live on time and balancing accessibility testing needs?

So, my gut here is it’s not so much testing needs it’s fixing. That’s delivering accessible products, what we term meeting for in there, is all about does our product need to be perfect before we launch it? Or, so, for example here, this is a spread sheet of all of the accessibility issues, some testing found. We fixed them all. They’re all green. It goes live. In the real world, you won’t have time to fix them all. So, you need to draw a line at some point, have a project plan for the rest of the stuff that, to fix after you’ve gone live and put an accessibility statement out there to explain when that might be coming to people. That sort of thing, you know, these are the key practical issues that people have. You don’t have to be perfect. You just need to talk about what you’re trying to do. That can really help you. That product management training, if that sounds like where you’re coming from.

How can you support neurodivergent staff at a busy visitor attraction, when the routine will change day by day? We are often asked to provide better comms, but we don’t always have the details in advance. A lot of our work involves adapting on the spot. That’s what Colin wanted to ask. That’s really hard. We do a lot of work with organisations to help them set up their processes for doing things like events. For example, this is actually one of the slides from our event course. Things like what is your policy? How far will you go to accommodate people’s needs and preferences? What’s your default policy? How far in advance will you ask people to tell us what your needs are. If you aren’t able to get that in advance, how will you be able to handle that.

That’s something we help organisations do in a policy perspective. You know, here is the sort of thing that we do to help organisations really understand what they might need to do for people who have neurodiversity. Their information needs, how best to communicate with them, that sort of thing. We do this across all different types of disability in a lot of our training. So, if this sounds like it might be useful for you, then please ask.

But tech can help a lot of the time. So, for example, you know, if say, so our captioner, who Sam, she’s with us on this, she’s doing a great job, if for example, she has an emergency, and has to leave the call, I can turn on the captions in PowerPoint to actually do that sort of thing. Similarly, if you’re in a meeting where somebody says oh, actually I can’t you know, get what I need from this, sometimes, if you know where some of the features are, you can turn things on and that can be particularly useful for people who are neurodivergent, especially people with ADHD and that sort of thing. Customer service training is there.

Moving us on quickly. So, AI, we can say a lot about this. We will say a lot about this in November. We said a lot about this last October. But a few questions that came through. The first two, Colin and Joseph. They were basically saying, people are telling us we don’t have to do accessibility any more. AI will sort it for us. We’re worried that this is, you know AI is a bad thing for accessibility. Our way of looking at things often times is to get our point across, we find somebody else who doesn’t work in accessibility but is saying the same point that we want to make.

This particular one is Sam Lewis, this was why AI powered creativity requires a strong human touch. He was talking about what he termed the last mile problem. The more you use it, the more you find that AI doesn’t quite get you all the way. An AI produced Coke bottle that’s 90% right is 100% wrong from a brand perspective. We need to understand what AI can do and what it can’t do, how these things come together to give a good thing. You’re stupid if you don’t used AI, but I would suggest you’re stupid if you don’t, if you just use AI. It’s not going to give you what you need. It’s not good enough at the moment. It might be in the future, but not for now.

Often times, if AI doesn’t give you quite what you want, you might want to improve the prompts. You might want to take what it does and fix the output before using it. You might say you know what, this is a category that AI can’t do. These are the sorts ever things, have the conversation with the people around you, use it for what it’s good at. But always have human being in the process. Because that’s will make sure you don’t have the brand fails.

How do you strategically manage accessibility in new tech, like AI generated content? So, these are four things you need to consider. This is what our team were talking about last October, making sure that there’s diversity in your data sets, so when you’re training AI. Making sure that you’re testing with people with a disability. And also, making sure that if you are creating AI to help people with a disability, that you actually understand what it is they need, so you’re solving a problem they have, rather than solving a problem they don’t have. There’s a lot of that happened in the past. It’s not good.

Prompts, yeah, you know, enable people to get the best from AI. Often times it’s actually enabling them to understand what prompts to give the AI to get the best out of it. And make sure the stuff that comes out of it is accessible. There’s stuff there from October, last year. There’s stuff there in our trends webinar from January this year as well. If you want more on accessibility there’s going to be loads more in November. But if you haven’t checked either of those out yet, both are available, again completely free on HiHub.

What happens if we’re not actually creating this thing? What happens if a vendor is actually the organisation that are ruining the accessibility in our company? What do we do? Well, here’s the question from Deborah, how do we handle vendors who have no road map to accessibility? Their products are somewhat unique in the market, but they’re unconcerned about making them more accessible to meet the standards. How do we handle this? I love that question. Because often times, it brings in another angle on accessibility. Of course, accessibility is for people with a disability, who might be a customer to your organisation. But it’s also for your staff, who may have a disability. A lot of the things that we buy, for example, Zoom that we’re using on this call, we didn’t make. So, actually asking the vendors, you know, is accessibility actually in there? And then working out what to do with the answers is a key thing for a lot of organisations to make sure that the digital tools are accessible.

So, again, these are two slides from our accessibility and procurement workshops that we’re running for lots of organisations. The key thing here is the policy. So, if you’re trying to buy a product for a company and they, it isn’t accessible, what do you do? Do you have a policy that says, well, we just won’t buy it then? Or do you need to be a bit more flexible and say, well, OK, accessibility maybe isn’t a yes/no thing. Let’s see if they can improve over time. Sounds like that particular one, that was being talked about, maybe didn’t want to improve.

So, we will come to that in a moment. But it could be that what you could do is just to think about this and make sure that you have, if you like, a policy and a way of working that will actually help you in these circumstances. Think about it up front. Because it’s not just one thing, that you’ll be procuring in the year. Chances are it will be ten, 20 new digital tools for different parts of your organisation. Everybody needs to be thinking about accessibility. And if you are in a situation, say for example, like most local councils that we know, where the Government accessibility monitor has come and they’ve done an accessibility audit of your website. You get this report back that says these are all of the things that are wrong with it, the number one reason why those never get fixed is because that Council never made that website. It was made by a digital company that they never asked about accessibility in the past. It’s not in the contract.

So, they need to go back to a company that they’ve maybe not spoken to for three years. You know when you made that thing for us, it wasn’t accessible. Can you do all this work to fix it? What do you think that company is going to say. Well, you should have asked at the time. This is loads of work. We’ve not heard from you. What else are you buying from us, that sort of thing. It could be that it’s a digital tool that you have on subscription. You can say OK, the first time we can get out of this contract with you, we’re going to shelf your thing. We don’t want to use it any more unless you make it accessible. That might be one thing.

Think about the other reasons you can give that organisation to do what you need them to do. We help organisations think through that in workshops all the time. And surprise, surprise, it’s that same buy-in that you’ve probably been doing to actually get this thought about in your organisation in the first place. Why should that company do it? You know, are you the first organisation or the last organisation that will ask them to do accessibility? Are you doing them a favour by telling them that there’s a problem in their products, and actually, that they won’t be able to sell it to other organisations because of that.

That makes it feel very, very different to a company that we’ve not heard from, for years, wants us to do loads of free work for them, for no apparent reason. Huh? The buy-in and the sales aspect of how you portray accessibility is so important, all the way through your career in this area. As I say, if those workshop sound like the sort of thing that you or your colleagues and procurement where you work need, please get in touch. We would love to help.

And then the last one, before we give you a mechanism that we are putting together to actually help you ask questions of us in the future, maintenance of accessibility over time. It’s one of the key things that is really, really important at the moment. The European Accessibility Act, for example, says you need to get accessible with your product. You need to let us know how you’re going to make sure that you keep accessible.

So, this question from Lisa B bang on: What’s the best or cheapest way to maintain accessibility on a site? Automated tools or audits every couple of years? How would we do this? So, automated tools, yeah, you’re mad if you don’t use them. They’re very, very good at the things that they can do. There’s loads of them out there. By the time I finish this, probably somebody will have launched a new one. It’s what people are doing, especially in this era of AI. They are getting better and better. But they’re still nowhere near where you need to be.

You know, normally, automated testing gives you a round about 30% of WCAG. So that’s 30% of those guidelines. It doesn’t really enable you to understand how you’re doing against the others. The other guidelines. And those guidelines aren’t everything. Remember, back to where we started, that really great question about saying look, it’s really important to make sure there are people with a disability actually in this process, because not all of their needs are in the guidelines. If you want to get good at this, it’s not just about tools, it’s about embedding them in the way that you do your testing and actually, thinking about this in a slightly more nuanced way. So again, that’s digital accessibility products talks about this a lot.

The sorts of things that we find organisations doing as they mature in the way they think about doing accessibility testing is this: Yeah, they start off with the external audit. Everyone does. They normally then go oh, yeah, OK, we’ve done that. We’ve fixed some things. We need an automated tool to help us going forward. The good ones then say, actually, let’s see if we can test some of this internally. Let’s see if we can get, if we have got some people who do some testing for maybe, you know, performance of our products, browser support, can they do some of this accessibility stuff too? Yeah, they can. Maybe, we can actually get to a point where we’re doing our own audit or get to user testing. From our perspective, yeah, it’s really good to have an automated tool. It’s very good to do external audits. But they’re expensive. If you can do it in-house, it’s so much better.

So, we train QAs, we train people in how to become auditors. This is the head of QA from HSBC China when I was training them. Before the course I was a bit in awe of accessibility auditors. Does that feel like someone you know? And now, I know that our QAs can do this too. And we can have a bigger impact than the auditors do, because QAs are actually testing things as stuff is happening. Some have accessibility is really hard. Some of it is really simple. With a bit of training you can get people to understand how to do it themselves. So, again, we did a whole webinar on this March this year. A few months ago. Because from our perspective, EAA is sustainable if you can find sensible ways of keeping that good level of accessible that you’ve been trying to get to. If you keep on having to pay lots of money to external organisations, it just doesn’t feel as good.

So, I’m going it hand over to Pete now, hopefully that’s answered a fair bunch of questions. But Pete is there another way of doing this? And that will be ongoing?

PETE: Yes. So, we are quite, we are quite excited. We have been playing around with AI ourselves. We are looking to launch a new resource called HiBot in the next couple of months. We’re looking for some beta testers to help us with that. What we’ve done is we’ve taken a chatbot and stuffed it with information from our webinars, information from Jonathan’s books, some stuff on our website, other resources. Really, we were thinking well there’s lot of people with questions for us. They want to have a quick answer. And they want to see what that says to them.

So, I put a lot of questions in the chat that says have you got any questions that you would like to ask a chatbot? We are going to be risky and try this out in front of you.

The second thing is I’m going to put into the chat as well, if you are an organisation that is working for an organisation that’s already one of our clients, or you are setting up a new project with us, we would love to invite you to be one of our beta testers. We have a certain number of places for that. E-mail me if you would like to be considered to be a beta tester. We ask you to try it out, put real questions in and give us feedback.

So, I am going to share my screen. OK. So, what we will have HiBot will be under our website. But you can ask any business question of it. So, it’s not going to answer technical questions like how do I write the code of this? So, I’ve looked at some of the questions we’ve had today. So how can I help my product team embed accessibility into the team? What support should I give from an accessibility team and maybe what should I get an external provider to do. I will kick off with that question. And let’s see what it gets. With any chatbot, it is, this one is pulling from our information primarily. It will give you a reasonably good answer. I keep looking and thinking, that’s what I would say. Probably because I wrote some of the stuff that goes into it. It is not a substitute for a professional advice in the sense that it doesn’t know your context.

What would you do? You might want to do, if you’re from a central team, provide training and awareness, give guidelines and resources, provide some support and consultation to them. So regular check-ins, maybe a dedicated channel. Provide governance and monitoring. What might you ask from outside? People like us can give you audits. We’ve got training programmes, maybe you buy some consulting days and some strategy development. And we are a bit naughty, it is our site.

So, we give you suggestions of products that we provide that might help you answer your question. So, that one link, let’s, has anyone got any questions in the chat? I cannot quite read those quick enough. Anything up there which somebody else would ask? A really quick question? Let me move that. In the absence of that … so people in my organisation who don’t know about accessibility think that AI is the answer to everything. What’s your take on this?

So, Jonathan I think you answered some of this in the chat, in the course today. Let’s see what HiBot would give. Fingers crossed. Let’s see if it’s going to be aligned. Yes, it’s very useful. But it doesn’t solve everything. It complements but not replaces human expertise is essential, absolutely. What we see with AI is it doesn’t give you context. Particularly things like we were talking about, alt text, it doesn’t give you the context, the why you want to do it. Make sure it’s not biased. Make sure it doesn’t leak your data. It’s going to improve dramatically and you need to know what’s right. So, we actually do an AI on accessibility webinar. It’s a lunch and learn thing or we go into more detail where we talk about accessibility and AI and explore it with clients who want to talk about their situation.

So, there’s two examples. Has anyone got any other questions in the chat? Can somebody see, find me a question?

JONATHAN: There’s useful tools I can use for accessibility testing in the build pipeline. That’s just come in.

PETE: This will probably not give you specific vendor stuff, because that’s not going to be in our internal resources. But what are some useful tools I can use for accessibility – why is that so hard to spell? Testing in the build process? What’s it going to say? So, wave is something we see people use. Axe is another one. Google light house, these are some of the items that we list on our courses around, there’s a variety of tools from the integrated ones to the add-on ones. I would say this answer here gives you some ideas. You can go and look elsewhere on Google for specific items. And you will notice that we’ve answered something with a competitor. Because DQ provides a useful tool.

JONATHAN: That’s awesome. Thanks Pete. I will pop back to mine. There you are. If you like that idea, then as I say please get in touch with Pete. And we’re looking for people to beta test that. Not necessarily live in front of hundreds of people, but wherever you are.

So, end of the webinar. We’ve hit our 5pm hour. If you love stuff in here, you know, we’re finding people going oh, I went to this great webinar and these are some of the things that I noted down and put it in LinkedIn, that’s great, just credit us if you do it. We always credit other organisations when we do it.

We have more webinars coming up: I mentioned one on the EAA, four organisations in France are being sued already. Organisations are saying more about how they’re testing for it. That sort of thing. More about that at the end of next month. And then, the end of October, we’re talking about crafting a strategic accessibility plan.

Thank you so much for your time today. I hope what that’s done is it’s given you some answers to the questions you had whether it was from my voice or in the chat and some potential opportunities for you to get this in an ongoing way with HiBot. Thank you so much. And yeah, if we can be of more help to you, contact us via our website and look forward to seeing you on the next webinars.

Thanks everybody. Enjoy the rest of your month. See you soon, I hope. Take care, bye-bye.