Accessibility without compromise

Announcer:
Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech. Welcome to the XTech Podcast where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations and insight that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Foerster MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry. I’m delighted to be working with Fox Agency as the host for the XTech podcast and as a curator for the XTech community. Now today I am delighted to be joined by John Abbott. He’s the Head of Product at Recite Me. Hi, John.

John Abbott:
Hi, Debbie. Nice to be with you.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Thank you. Right, so we always like to get to know our guests a bit as humans before we dive into the pool and we’ve got a lot to cover today. But John, you’re in tech. Is that where you always thought you’d be or did it come as a bit of a surprise?

John Abbott:
So I’ve had quite a convoluted journey into technology. So, yes, day to day I’m head of Product at Recite Me, but I did a music degree at university and like all music graduates, you wonder, what on earth am I going to do with that? So, yeah, so it just happened. I got into wine at university.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Nice choice, John.

John Abbott:
It’s a good lifestyle and a good career choice. So I ended up working in wine and ended up at a wine magazine, quite a well known one, called Decanter. And yeah, and I got into digital publishing. So my role was to bring wine, which you might imagine has a certain demographic, and to bring it to a slightly younger hipper crowd. So that’s where I got started. And the real learning for me was you can take the best wine writers in the world, but depending on how you package up their words and their articles, you can get completely different engagement levels. So for me, that was that first realisation of saying, oh, hang on, actually we should probably pay a little bit of attention to how we package up content to make sure it can be accessed by the widest range of people as possible.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Interesting. Okay, so I’ve had some other musicians, one even describe myself as a bit of a failed musician. I won’t make any qualitative statements there, but I’ve never had anyone come by way of wine. So a really interesting squiggly career. But that brings a lot that’s interesting to whatever tech role that you’re doing because you bring that wider curiosity and problem solving.

John Abbott:
I think so, yeah. So I would hope that all musicians bring some form of listening ability and the ability to work with other people.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Interesting.

John Abbott:
And I guess in wine, there’s so much choice available and there’s so much to learn. You have to accept you’re not going to know it all, but you can at least start to chart a path through and start to build some order in the chaos, I guess.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Fantastic. Okay. And then you find yourself at Recite Me Now. Not everyone will have heard of it. I’m going to ask you to tell a little bit more. As far as I know, it was founded in the late 1990s, I think, around Ross Linnett’s diagnosis for dyslexia. But a lot’s changed since then. Can you just walk me through that quickly?

John Abbott:
That’s exactly right. So Ross is the founder of Recite Me. Recite Me is a company, a technology company, and we make inclusion and accessibility software. So we help people to personalise web content, like websites, in a way that works for them. And. And it all started because of Ross. His diagnosis of dyslexia came fairly late, when he was just finishing up university. And his big frustration was, why do I have to provide my own software? When I’ve got this software and it’s on my laptop and then I go to the library, say, suddenly that software’s not there, so why is that my responsibility? And that’s really where Recite Me started. That was the picture back then. I think what’s changed is the responsibility of who really should be providing that technology.

And originally that was on the individual, but these days there’s much more onus on organisations, companies, public institutions, to offer that technology to individuals and be more welcoming and be more inclusive of their needs.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think it’s moved in the 90s. That’s gone from just companies knowing that’s a nice thing to do to something we have to. There’s a lot of changes coming, as far as I understand, and it will affect a lot of B2B businesses, some of whom may not realise that. Can you walk me through that?

John Abbott:
That’s exactly right. So if you’re in Europe, or if you sell into Europe at all, you might have heard of the European Accessibility Act. So that came into force in June of this year. If you haven’t got a plan, you should probably get a plan and put something in place. But that effectively ups the ante on organisations to confront digital accessibility there on a Much more legal footing. But it’s not just Europe. In the US, the new ADA Title II comes into force in April of next year. Organisations are being asked to really look at their whole digital landscape and not just things like websites, but also things like electronic kiosks and touch points and ticket vending machines to make sure that they are meeting minimum accessibility requirements.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay, so this is not just an EU thing, it’s anyone that’s selling into the EU, but it’s also coming to the US, so, and bluntly, it feels like the front of a wave. That means this will be a global issue. And I think now you’re going to have to help me with my acronyms here. WCAG. WCAG, Walk me through that. That’s, that’s the new Basic and there’s something a 2.2 coming. What does that mean?

John Abbott:
So we call it WCAG. Other people call it WCAG. It stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and they’re published by the W3C who are, I guess the founders of the Internet. Tim Berners Lee started the W3C and they essentially set the rules to say that if you’re aiming for a certain level of accessibility on your digital platform, you probably want to tackle this number of things. So there are different levels in there. There’s what they call single A, double A and triple A. Most organisations are aiming for somewhere around double A. And you’re right as well. 2.1 was the incumbent standard and last year that was updated to 2.2.

So there are of new tests in there available to test your websites against and your mobile apps against to make sure that they are accessible for the widest range of people possible and that you’ve covered off not just from a visual point of view, but from a wider technology perspective. So people who use things like screen readers, can they access your site in the same way as somebody who’s got a mouse and a keyboard?

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay, so John, if I’m listening to this podcast and I’ve just spilled a little bit of coffee because I didn’t have WCAGs or anything like that, this is a fast moving landscape. Where do I start? How do I approach this for my company? From that B2B context.

John Abbott:
Yep. So we would always advise find a partner that you trust. Not everybody is an accessibility expert and I think, Recite Me, that’s a journey that we’ve been on. We also have learned the world of accessibility and how important it is and how fast moving it is. So we’ve designed tools ourselves to help people. We have what we call the WCAG Checker, which is effectively a website scanner, which helps people to really get under the skin of what’s going on the code base of their sites. But we also, we built that offering out to make sure it includes things like humans and human advice and human consultancy, so that if you’re an executive in a company, you’re not just relying on software, you actually have knowledgeable people to be able to say, you know, maybe tackle it in this order.

Have you thought about doing this and trying to put together a sensible plan, usually, which starts with the first step, which we always recommend to everybody, of aligning around an accessibility statement. And that usually is that first piece of work to say, okay, we may not know what the end goal is, but we can certainly say that we’re starting a journey and here’s a really public declaration of the journey that we’re on.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think that’s really important because legislation is an important building block in this process. But if we’re not careful, it can inspire that tick box mentality. And I know you’ve really cautioned against that one and done. There’s a smarter way for businesses to do this rather than just compliance. Can you walk me through that? And I think in particular, how do I sell that internally if people do have that tick box mentality?

John Abbott:
Yeah. So for us, it’s about culture more than anything else. There are legal requirements, there are tick box exercises that you can do, but really it’s about acknowledging that you have partners, you have customers, you have employees, and that those people really are the fundamentals of your business. So if you can take steps to make sure that they’re supported, ultimately that’s going to pay you back over the long run. It really is about removing barriers and saying, how can I take my organisation to the widest group of people possible and make sure, as a good host, they’re having a good time while they’re engaging with us.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think there you’re getting into the business and imperatives and away from just compliance. And I like the way you think about those three different lenses because one of our primary users that we’re thinking about are employees as well as customers. And from a B2B lens, it’s reminding ourselves that suppliers are looking at this is starting to be built into procurement, frames, etc. So if I really want to close that deal, if I really want to grab that new client, this has to be in the mind. This is smart business, not just doing the right thing, isn’t it?

John Abbott:
That’s exactly Right. So we see this more and more procurement requirements are increasing every day for accessibility. And not just are you accessible, but can you prove it and who told you’re accessible and what’s their phone number and can we check with them? So that level of traceability, just about what you say, but what have you actually done is a core part of procurement these days, particularly in the public sector.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And we’ve talked about on other episodes that B2C mindset is blurring with the B2B mindset because the people that are our businesses are still essentially human. And good accessibility can result in really good UX customer experience. And that I think often gets baked out of when we’re thinking about these sorts of discussions.

John Abbott:
Exactly right. So we tend to think of it like designing for everybody. So if we make adjustments to make a website clearer or to have a better navigation structure or to make things more readable and understandable, it actually benefits everybody. So making those sort of core design choices is something that is more inclusive by design, but also make sure that you’re covering off an audience segment that wouldn’t otherwise have been able to engage with your content or to be able to go through your checkout process or get in touch with your customer service desk. There are over 135 million people just in Europe alone with some sort of disability that struggle to be able to use websites in their normal form.

Just taking a small step and reaching out to say to people, do you know what, actually we’re going to make that easier for you, surely? Has to be good for everybody.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Absolutely. I mean, I couldn’t believe. And it’s not just disability. As an older woman who’s starting to. I’ve got my glasses here beside me as I’m working, et cetera. This is really looking at a cross cutting UX consideration to look at it. Now you’re head of product at Recite Me. So how do you define your product vision in terms of accessibility for all, especially in that B2B enterprise context?

John Abbott:
Yeah. So for us it’s about being the accessibility partner of choice. We know that organisations are really busy, we know that they’re complex organisations, that the different ownership tribes, the different workflows, the different sign off procedures, everybody’s got lots of stressors and sometimes accessibility and inclusion is a bit difficult to find the exact owner for. So I think for us our role is really to help people get organised and get comfortable with having a strategy going forward and helping to get their own side on board and making sure that it’s actually communicatable to external audiences and people internally. And that’s not just accessibility. I mentioned that we started as an inclusion company, our toolbar, some people might have seen it, we have a toolbar that allows people to make changes to the websites that they’re on.

So coloured backgrounds, different fonts, all sorts of line height, spacing and making it fit in a way that is perfect for you. And I think if you take that whole mentality into large organisations, you don’t have to have these cookie cutter experiences. You can open all of your digital properties up to allow people to personalise things in a way that works for them. And by doing that, you tend to get the best out.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And that’s. And I think that’s where some of the magic happens. Because looking at. It’s not just accessibility, it’s customisation. And so people can begin to, as users may have no usability reason that they’re doing it, but this is how they like it. And the fact that you’re. We’re almost going through a circle, it’s the responsibility of businesses to do it, but it’s giving more power back to the user, the customer in that respect.

John Abbott:
That’s it. We think of it as enablement. What can you do to get the extra 10, 15% of enjoyment out of your people and your customers? And usually it’s by putting them in a place where they feel comfortable and able to perform. So a small anecdote.

In our own office, we have lots of people with dyslexia and they all have the Recite Me toolbar installed. And what’s fascinating is that they all set it in completely different ways in terms of the right foreground colour and background colour, which font they like to use. There is no one size fits all for dyslexia and other impairments, any disability.

Exactly, exactly. So allowing people to customise it in a way that brings out the best of them is absolutely our core vision.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So, you know, in terms of looking at that, where do you see accessibility tools integrating with existing. Because it’s about existing infrastructure that sometimes is the big headache. And where do you see the global accessibility standards evolving for B2B enterprises?

John Abbott:
Yeah. So integration is a big one at the enterprise level. Usually people have got existing tools and workflows and accessibility doesn’t have to be a threat to that. Most software organisations now offer some sort of interplay with other software pieces. We’re no different to that. If you’re lucky enough to use things like jira, we integrate with that and you know, our learning journey has been sitting down with people to say, how do we introduce accessibility into what you’re already doing with the least amount of friction and the most amount of enjoyment? And usually it is that putting in place just small little connectors to help both the flow of accessibility in, maybe in a design process or if you’re testing software, but also in the visibility of the upside. So how well are we doing? How much have we improved?

How much is still to go and making those metrics available to people so that they can actually be celebrated when there is success.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it’s crucial to get it, you know, if you can, to begin to put that in at the design place. Because building it into is much easier and much more seamless and effective than it is bolting onto, because for every three things you bolt on, something falls off or catches something else. So getting that in at that design phase and getting everyone bought into, that’s huge.

John Abbott:
Yep, it is. And some of that’s just about taking a step back. People are so busy trying to increase and grow and make things better sometimes, yeah, taking that step back just to look at that process and say, is there a better way we could do this upfront that saves out some of those issues at the other side, it generally tends to lead to more interesting discussions as well about, you know, what’s. What’s your view and do we all agree and could we even try some more innovative stuff in terms of AB testing and all that? So, yeah, just even having those conversations about including more personas and more perspectives at that design stage can actually be quite enjoyable.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay, so, John, you. You see it all. You see the good, the bad and the ugly. What are the trends you’re seeing? When we think about large enterprises and how they’re approaching it, are they at the legal stage, Are more people moving strategic, what’s happening there?

John Abbott:
So it’s worth being completely honest. There are some absolute horror shows that still exist on the Internet. We see those most days and usually it’s just because nobody’s taken the time to address them first up. But things are improving, generally speaking. We touched on procurement earlier and I think that does start to play a role in concentrating minds around doing things a little bit better. There’s always more that can be done, you know, and I think a lot of organisations struggle to see it as an ongoing process. We think in terms of deliverables and saying, oh, actually if we can achieve these few things by this date, then we can tick it off and then everybody can go back to their day jobs.

But actually, the reality of the Internet is you’re always publishing more pages on your website, your landscape is always getting bigger. So you need some sort of strategy that says, how do I confront the badness of the past, how do I deal with what I’ve got in front of me today? And how do I make sure that all of the great stuff that we’re learning now can actually go forward and make better design choices and better structural choices to bring down both our technical debt, but also to increase the access that people can have out of the box?

Debbie Forster MBE:
And are you seeing there, you know, as companies that are starting their accessibility journey, are you seeing companies coming up with some effective ways of moving beyond just compliance scores? You know, what are metrics that enterprise companies could use to measure the success of their initiatives?

John Abbott:
Yeah, well, we tend to try and benchmark organisations in a number of different ways. It’s not just about the number of issues that you have, but it’s about how effectively you communicate to people what you’re going to do about those issues. So a really big sort of pass or fail for us is whether somebody can report an accessibility issue. So you may have fixed everything that you can think of, but there will be some case that you haven’t thought about. And having somebody be able to come to your site and say, actually, I found this problem.

Can I address it and give it to you, is the hallmark of an organisation that really understands that it is a feedback loop and that being responsive to your users and listening to what they have to say is really a smart thing to do because it does play a role in the design process. And there’s no better feeling than being able to go back to people and say, thank you for raising it and we’re delighted that we fixed it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah, yeah. And that virtuous loop in and of itself is. Is really powerful, I think, for everyone involved. Okay, now. No episodes complete if we’ve not talked a little bit about AI, so I note that you’ve got an accessibility checker and it now includes AI technology. How is AI changing the landscape, the compliance landscape for enterprises? Is it the great hope, you know, is it fixing it all and we can all go home?

John Abbott:
So it depends on your perspective. We do use AI in our products and that’s been a really interesting journey to be on, trying to get them in and to say, what are we doing here to help people? A note of caution. AI on its own is as good as the people building out the software. And one of the problems that we have in our industry is there are a lot of actors are making some pretty egregious claims about what AI can do already, that it doesn’t necessarily do very well at the moment. And we’ve looked at that and said, well, our reason for being is to make things easier for people, so what’s the right path forward? So for us, we use AI on a do no harm basis.

We’re trying to work it in a way that makes sense to either simplify something for somebody, or to speed it up, or to automate where we can but be mindful of not being the sort of people to automate and start to spam users in a way that they can either not get rid of or that they wouldn’t really benefit from.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Because sometimes the nature of our automation is that it is not accessible, it doesn’t allow that customisation. And if we think that AI is a basis of all the data we have, we’ve got some really dodgy data when it comes to accessibility. It’s not a fabulous track record that we’re building on in this respect.

John Abbott:
That’s exactly right. But also from an organisation perspective, sometimes with AI there’s a temptation to tick something off, to say that I’ve done it without ever really confronting it, to say that I understood what I was doing. So you probably want to be asking questions if. If you have millions of alt tags that are missing, just before you press that automation button to make them all appear, maybe stop and ask that question, how is it possible that I don’t have alt tags? And what would I need to do going forward to make sure that those alt tags are of good quality for people? And how would I know if they weren’t?

Debbie Forster MBE:
And this goes back to your first principle. This can’t be one and done. This can’t be a tick box. There has to be genuine thinking along this of why we’re doing it, what are the business purposes, all of these sorts of things. Because you can see how some people, and I’m going to assume that some of those horror stories you’re talking about, where there is that tick box one and done, just comply and then use AI to automate it. Job done.

John Abbott:
Yes.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And you could make a colossal mess there, can’t you?

John Abbott:
And people do. We sometimes get involved in cases where people have used AI and it hasn’t really gone that well. In other cases, people have their heads turned by AI and sometimes they’re told that actually it’s going to transform things at a very low price point. The truth is, somewhere between those two things, it can definitely help. It is amazing in terms of some of the simplification of information and helping people to synthesise things that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to access. But yeah, I would say, you know, embrace it in terms of a mindset, but always keep one eye open.

Debbie Forster MBE:
It’s keeping the brain engaged. I think AI is its most risky when it is used as a proxy for understanding or experience or knowledge. When we use it to shortcut or this is a cheaper way of doing stuff, that’s where we really trip ourselves up. AI sings when it’s in the hands of experts who understand the why, the how. And so if I’m early in this journey of really trying to up my game in terms of accessibility and meeting these new compliance standards, it’s not the time to just grab an off the shelf AI piece. We’ve got to get your strategy, you’ve got to know why you’re using it as a tool, not just throw it in willy nilly.

John Abbott:
Exactly. And we always ask our customers and our partners, how would you know if something wasn’t right and what safeguards you’ve got in place to say, I’m looking after my audience and I would know if we’ve got a proper problem. Yeah. Accessibility is both the proactive and sometimes also the defensive and saying what steps do we need to take so that, you know, I can turn up at my management meeting or my senior leadership meeting and I can know that we’re in a good place.

Debbie Forster MBE:
You have to be able to know what a hallucination looks like if you’re going to spot it and AI has shown itself very capable of that. But if I know nothing, a hallucination can look like great practise. So you’ve got to have that homework done. Okay, so look, John, we could talk about this forever and we might have you back at some stage to think about because I think this is a space that’s going to continue to move really quickly. I always love hearing from the guests. If you look more to the horizon and it can be about anything, doesn’t have to be about accessibility or something like that. What’s grabbing your attention at the horizon for tech?

John Abbott:
So for me it’s about the purpose of business. I think one of the really interesting things at the moment is a focus on tech for good. And also looking at the if I’m going to make a tech company or if I’m going to start a company, why am I doing it? And who is it helping? And I think that in this era of innovation, of fast releases and getting products to market very quickly and AI asking those questions about why and who is getting the value from it are really quite important.

And I should say I’m really encouraged by Gen Z and the strides that people are making to ask more pressing questions of not just the companies that they found but also the companies that they work for and to say what are we doing this for and how can we make sure that we have an unmistakable purpose in what we’re doing?

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think we are at another one of these tipping points in tech where there are some who are very much falling back into that move fast and break things. But what that speed and the scale of what we could break is getting higher and higher. But I love what you’re saying because I think it’s not just Gen Z, I think millennials followed by Gen Z are really asking those questions and they’re asking that questions on who they buy from, how they spend their money, who they work for. Yes, times are hard, but it’s going to be moving and less older folks like me saying all blessed millennials, Gen Z. When we put those two groups together, that’s 40% of the population, that is 40% of our workforce, our customers, our clients, our services. And they are asking those questions.

And the companies that can lean forward and offer those answers are going to get the best talent, are going to get a more resilient and loyal workforce, customer base, user base, etc. And I think we just need to keep shining a light on that. Amidst all the excitement about what can be done, asking yourselves why who does it benefit has never been more important in tech. I think we’re in violent agreement there. And then last, you know, I love to hear what guests are reading or watching or listening to. That’s valuable. What would you suggest that I fill my list to with?

John Abbott:
Yeah, I like to read. I listen to lots of things. I think my favourite at the moment is a book called Adaptive Leadership. So it’s by two Harvard Business School academics, Marty Linsky and Ron Heifetz. And really it’s about a style of leadership that is maybe a little bit untraditional. It is about resisting the urge to act and to ask more questions up front and to deal in the grey areas of things that aren’t necessarily comfortable. And they have this really great analogy about when you’re looking at situations and you’re really busy as a day to day professional, there are two perspectives you can look at the same situation.

They use this analogy of a disco and they say you can have the same perspective, but you’ll see it differently depending on whether you’re on the balcony looking down at the situation or whether you’re on the dance floor.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Nice.

John Abbott:
And I think that is a, for me, is a really great way of being able to contextualise the same situation, but from multiple perspectives.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay, now that sounds fascinating. And given what we’ve been talking about and how fast moving, I think the noise, the disco’s never been louder, the dance floor has never been more packed. And it sounds a fascinating book to try and ask ourselves, are we getting up to the balcony as well as the dance floor? Because I think a lot of it is hard not to just see things from the dance floor. Not had a disco analogy to finish a show with. And that’s great. John, listen, I have loved talking to you. Thank you so much for joining us for the episode today.

John Abbott:
Thank you, Debbie.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And thank you to all of you for joining us on this episode of X Tech. If you’d like to appear as a guest on the show, don’t waste a minute. Email us now at  [email protected]. I’d like to thank our whole team of tech experts at Fox Agency for making this podcast possible. I’m Debbie Foerster and you’ve been listening to X Tech.

Announcer:
Keep exploring the world of tech. Subscribe to our podcast to never miss an episode. To discover more opportunities for global B2B tech brands, visit Fox Agency today.