Accessibility by design | #11 Dean Birkett

Dean Birkett and Tim Damen discuss the role of consultancy and how to empower internal teams through training. Real-world examples illustrate the impact of accessibility on individuals, while the discussion also explores the future of accessibility technology, the maturity levels within organizations, and the influence of AI. The conversation concludes with inspiring messages for accessibility advocates, highlighting the ongoing journey towards inclusive design.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Digital Accessibility
00:05 The Journey into Accessibility
02:48 The Role of UX in Accessibility
05:43 Designing for Accessibility
08:55 The Importance of Early Involvement
11:48 Auditing and Continuous Improvement
14:45 Empowering Teams through Training
17:37 Real-World Impact of Accessibility
20:40 Centering Conversations on People
23:39 Future Opportunities in Accessibility
26:15 The Importance of Personal Experience in Accessibility
27:45 Maturity Levels in Accessibility Practices
29:54 Building a Champions Network for Accessibility
30:55 Evolving Conversations in Accessibility
32:21 Incorporating Accessibility by Design
32:50 Framing Accessibility Discussions
35:13 Connecting with Users for Testing
38:28 Trends and Challenges in Accessibility
46:06 Inspiring Messages for Accessibility Advocates

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Transcript

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[MUSIC]>> Hello and welcome at FocusTrap, a digital accessibility podcast. My name is Tim Dama and I'm joined today by Dean Birkett, accessibility consultant, working currently for KLM, Skiescan and Markplatz. Welcome, Dean.>> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.>> Yeah, yeah, so glad you, you can join us here. I think we have a lot of things to talk about. Let's dive right into it. My first question is always something around how did you get into accessibility, which could you modify to improve accessibility in the online space? Yeah.>> Curious. Sure. So that's a big question to start with.>> Yeah.>> Yeah, so I think my journey probably started in around about 2010. I took some way to wonderful career tangents and ultimately I was had a job title of WebNaster, which was an interesting work at the time. I think with that job title, you move into different directions. Some people move into web design, some people move into web development. Myself, I moved into user experience design. And at the time, I was working for a EU funded organization, working in the galleries, libraries, archives and museum sector. And I think having the opportunity of being a UX in that kind of space gives you lots of flexibility to evolve and move into different directions. And so I was doing UX for about two years. And then there was a workshop from Derek Featherstone, who at the time was at level access. And I believe he moved to Salesforce. And the workshop was entitled Accessibility for UX Designers. And so for myself, I was a new-ish UX designer. And accessibility I'd heard of, but I didn't really know a great deal about. So I thought maybe it's an opportunity to learn more about what accessibility is and who it's for. And I look at that moment as being like one of these career transitions. It was kind of before the workshop and after the workshop, the way that I designed things and thought about things, just transforms. Yeah, and there's lots of things that I learned that I think I still put into practice today in my own workshops and things that I speak of. All from the dead one, the first step into accessibility. This course you took, or this session you joined. That's great. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a powerful statement as well for the impacts that these kind of workshops can have. That's also part of the reason I'm doing the podcast. Also to reach people who know a little about accessibility or a little to learn. And inspire them to get to know more about the topic. Yeah, absolutely. I think in this space, the more people speaking about it, the better. Yeah, it's great to get different voices as well from different perspectives and different fields. Yeah, definitely. I also don't speak a lot. Well, in the podcast, not a lot of UX, especially in two UX design yet. So that's also nice to speak from more from the engineering side. So engineering to UX. So I think I mean, UX has got an important part of course. I mean, there was a study many moons ago, I think from DQ, where they uncovered that most accessibility defects that they found were actually originated in design. So part of the things that I do nowadays is, I try to get across the point that accessibility defects can be created through that throughout the whole software development life cycle. Whether it's in concepts with listening design, handover, development. Yeah, cookie writing even. Yeah, everywhere. Yeah, everywhere. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think as an engineer, you're almost at the end of like, of course, you get a design delivered by a UX designer could be, but also then you implement it. And you as an engineer, you're close to the end of the cycle. So you're also, you can as an engineer, you can also act like a gatekeeper to, if you notice some things, okay, maybe this is not the right way or this is not, then you can then you are at the end and you can make adjustments or talk to people who need to be involved here. So that's also the like about the roles of front end developer in this. But how is this perspective from like a UX design? I think I mean, from the UX side of things, we got a tackle. Problems earlier, because you know, for design for development, sorry, a lot of things are almost retroactive fixes. Like a bug has been introduced and it's up to development to retroactively fix that bug. If they didn't play a part in actually creating the bug in the first place, of course, there's lots of lots of knowledge gaps where we couldn't have obviously discuss. But I think from UX, it's kind of recognizing what you can do in design. So the concept, the initial concept has to include people with disabilities. You know, the whole experience needs to be centered around the disabled experience, of course, undesirable voices. And so part of your user research should include people with disabilities, even at an early stage with your research and consulting. And then in the design phase, there are certain things that you, you know, really basic things that you should be checking for. I'm wearing this shirt here, which is kind of like, wearing contrast text on a gray to make a point. And I think that's one of the basic things that designers need to be checking and some don't. Yeah, some don't. I think a lot of them though, because I think color contrast is the most most prominent accessibility default, I think. Yeah, and you know, you can always point the finger at the designer, but obviously there's so many steps throughout the way where that should have been invented. So if there was a contrast issue, that would have been flagged, you could have been flagged in Figmural or whatever tool you used to stock to check the contrast. The handover to the developer, the developer, should have, they've got the tools to be able to point these out. They're linting and so forth. And then obviously when you go live, then you're going to be flagged for pretty much immediately, because they're the easiest ones to actually find. Yeah, and then these are also the first ones I'd point out. But in design as well, I mean that, you know, you're looking at things like touch target sizes, which are things that, you know, designers should have an impact on. They should be designed. The touch target is to be tapable. As you mentioned about content as well, I think the content writers need to be involved in the discussion at this early stage as well. And then one of the things that I find often can cause problems is the whole handover experience where a design could be handed over to say, you know, here is this pretty, pretty design. Now developer, go and build it. But there's so many things which are missing in the handover, like the interaction, the hidden meaning behind content, what you want to communicate to assistive technology. And so I think that's the kind of thing that helps to introduce bugs. And if we can tighten up of that connection, then I think that helps. Yeah, yeah, definitely. But what are some, so this is some part about the only hento for us are also work in an earlier stage in the UX design that can prevent these things from ending up maybe communicated wrongly with the engine and with the engineering team. I think there's work in every single step, to be honest. So, you know, UX designers are very much overwhelmed with having to deliver certain things within a certain time frame. And, you know, I think it's on product management, sorry, project managers, to be able to facilitate the need to create this time so that UX designers have time to actually do things properly at the start. Because, you know, if you generate in this time at the start, then it prevents retroactively fixing problems further down the path. I think there's a really old study from IBM Science Institute where they found that, you know, a bug which is introduced into the wild is 100 times more costly to fix than it is at the early stage. And so by generating time early wrong, then obviously, you're actually end up saving money for the organization and saving time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's also what a lot of companies are now working on trying to catch up with the EAA are also discovering because, of course, they have a lot of legacy. They have a lot of current state applications, which generally speaking, I've still a lot of accessibility problems in them. Moving back and, yeah, trying to remediate them all as some kind of project. I think it's a lot of, it's a lot of work. First, you need to find them. You need to discuss it. Then you need to, make up the right direction and maybe discuss what you really, you actually say, "Oh, this color's not good." Or we have this other problem. You need to come see it, come see it, come see it, play afterwards. So, quite some steps to take to get there. I think it's all about your processes and improving your processes. If you look at the digital accessibility maturity models, level access of mentioned already for ability now that would be 3C, you could use those to get a grasp of where you are in a certain area of your business. You could use that model to see where you are in your design or development and find out what your maturity level is. Then you can see what opportunities there are to actually improve that for the online procurement and hiring. It's really, really expand beyond digital accessibility, as I'm sure you know. Yeah, definitely. And so, you've mentioned already like, landing or plugins or other kinds of tools that will help you catch accessibility bugs earlier. What's your opinion about automating? I mean, it also made it at the moment. I think it's 20 to 40% of the effects that you can uncover. It requires, from my experience, it requires effort as well to actually set up to make sure that you are actually discovering as many bugs as possible. Because it seems to be, certainly from my experience, it seems to be very easy to detect bugs which are often flags. So, from me, if I'm doing some kind of like auditing, I would generally start with an automated test just to get a little bit of an understanding as to what kind of issues to be looking at for. But then I would move straight onto manual testing. So, I would do keyboard testing and then I would move onto that, I'd do a cognitive walkthrough. And then I would move onto screen reader testing. That's voiceover and Safari, all, MEDA and Chrome. I don't have many US clients, I think, Jaws is predominantly US-focused and very expensive. So, I put most of my efforts on those two setups. I don't know, obviously, if we're moving onto mobile, then the mobile platforms will talk back. So, how many audits do you generally do in a monthly basis? It depends. I mean, it's part of what I do. Depends on the client's needs. Are these smaller audits or larger ones? A bit of both to be honest. There's no real answer to that one because what I do now is provide consultancy to various clients on, and I think ultimately, it's about improving accessibility within their organisations and whatever that means. And so, that could be something like working with the design system, working with the designers, looking at Figma, seeing what they're creating, to have a bit of feedback on that, to make sure that the accessibility considerations are considered in design, and if so, to make sure that the handover experience development is communicated correctly. It could also be in documentation. If a Skyscanner has done a lot of work on the backpack design system, there's lots of introductions to various roles in the organisation as to what accessibility is, and then on a component level, what you need to know to make this component work in the most accessible way. Yeah, so I think, and for other organisations, you know, could be doing auditing, it could be a case of, hey, we need to know where we are with accessibility right now. You mentioned the EAA, and you know, lots of companies are appearing and saying, we need a little bit of help, and I think, you're starting with an audit, is probably a good idea just to get a little bit of a benchmark, as to where you are. But my goal really is to help them realise that an audit is only part of the answer. You know, you don't want to do an audit, and then a year later get another audit and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, because that's not helpful. Yeah. And so the way that I approach auditing is that I really work with the teams to help highlight what the problems are, who the problem is actually impacting, why it's a problem, and you know, ways in which you can solve that problem. What I don't do is I don't say, here is a developer issue, this is the code that's causing the problem, here is the fix, so that's not helpful. What I find certainly in the past, with those kind of audits, is that developers will just input that code and then go in, think about something else. And accessibility really is about, for me, is about making myself less needed, and more about empowering the internal teams to be able to find problems, find ways to resolve them and work things out themselves. Yeah. Yeah. So it's about building knowledge within your organization and empowering the people that are doing the on a daily basis or building stuff. So how important do you think training is also? Yeah, hugely important. I think, you know, base level understanding of what we're talking about, first of all, is helpful, because many, many accessibility talks are, they come from two angles, I would say, like internal talks, I mean, the discussions. It's very much had the legal focus, you know, what do we need to do to be compliant? Or it's very much a case of developer focus, which is what work out violations are we trying to get rid of? And you know, this is part of the discussion, of course, but it's not, you know, ultimately, we need to center the experience about around people with disabilities. And I think, you know, taking a step backwards, I mentioned that I was working for for Europeana, which was the start of my accessibility journey, I would say. And one of the early projects that I worked on there where I came at things through an accessibility lens was a project called the 1914-1918 project. And this was predominantly for people to tell stories about the First World War, and to share their physical objects to be digitised and shared for people to actually access. And fairly early on, I went to one of these workshops where they was collecting these items. And I saw that I would say 95% of the people at these workshops were very elderly. And so I was able to see people with, trying to use a digital device, maybe their knowledge at the time about technology was a little bit lessened than what it is now. But you know, they would have issues with fine motor control. Maybe there's a little bit of tremors when they're using a mouse. Maybe they're raising their glasses to look at text. And these kind of things. And so for me, coming fresh from this accessibility training to be able to see, thinking about accessibility affects everybody ultimately. It's not just around people with disabilities, even though you should always be centered around people with disabilities. But what we do actually benefits a wide range of people. And so I used that kind of knowledge from that workshop and the events that I went to. And what we were able to do is I was able to say, hey, we've got these personas that we're using, which I stole from a web for everyone, I think it was very old books. I'm not sure how dated that is. But what it did was it helped frame the discussion, these findings that I was able to present in the workshop, sorry, in these events. And you know, I was able to bump up contrast size. I was able to bump up the text size, which at the time, you know, in 2012, 2013, I think it was standard for 16, sorry, 14 pixels to be body coffee. So there was lots of like impact that we could do with that. That's interesting. Yeah. So what I personally really like about the UX part on accessibility is that you did the opportunity you have there to do also UX research. And it's something I'm not capable of doing, but also doing it at the time of doing. It's not in my range of focus. But I think you have a lot of experience with doing this research, right? At the ABN where I work, there's also UX research conducted on a regular basis with different variety of different groups from time to time. It could be maybe people having trouble reading stuff or low vision or different groups. And then this research is conducted. Research reports created and then it's communicated into the organization. And then I have to feeling it stops a little bit. So there are the no processes are being shaped. As far as I can see. So from the report to like adjusting ways of working. Yeah. I don't know. What do you maybe have? What is your experience with this? And how many missed opportunities there? Because if you're seeing somebody that's using a product and they're not able to use a product or running into difficulties. That is an amazing snippet video that you can share internally to get people to be aware of the problems. And I was really blessed in some aspects because of the fact that I was able to first hand perform as a research and to see the impact that design and development can have. And there's perhaps two stories which I think are pretty impactful that resonate with me. And they were from whenever I worked at an assistive where who are a company based in Amsterdam that build apps for nonverbal people. And when you think of digital accessibility, your head immediately goes to people with motor impairments, people with vision impairments, maybe people with hearing impairments and the cognitive space is a little bit, not as out there. They've got task forces for co-ga, for instance, but it's still a little bit early days. But people with speech difficulties are like, I have like not COVID in this kind of space. And so one of the research things that I did, I went to a cafe in Melbourne in Australia. And I met with somebody who used one of the apps that I work on. And it's all worked on. And it's a language app where you would tap on various buttons and you would hear a computerized voice which would say something for you. And when I went for a coffee, I met with the mother of this person with a very rare illness who was unable to verbally communicate and herself. And the server came to the table and asked what we would like to have to drink. So I had a long black. The mum, I think, had a flat white and then it went to the daughter and she used the app to tap in these buttons and order this drink, which was this amazing concoction which had sprinkles and marshmallows and all sorts. And I think, for me, sitting there knowing that I worked on the design of this app and seeing the impact that it had not only on the individual, but the parents, the family, the friends, the server. And I think that what we do is often missed. But as a front and developer, you're trying to not to create accessibility defects, but you're not seeing the impact that you're having by doing that. And I think another story which is one which will always stick with me is that again, with this app, there is a way to create a message and you can send that message to somebody else using messages or WhatsApp or whatever. And one of my former colleagues is a speech language pathologist and she was working with this young child who was at the early stages of learning how to use this app. And she used the app to type in "I love you, mum" and send that as a text message to a mother who was at work. And it's like those kind of moments are super impactful. And being able to recognize that what we do in accessibility is not about work out. It's not about EAA. It's not about these violations. It's about people. There's always about people. It's always about censoring the conversations on people's best to come. And about enabling them to do the stuff that you and me are also doing online or via technology, enabling them to send text messages or order something in a restaurant. There's an unlimited amount of opportunities I think also currently out there, right? Like this app or the most beautiful ideas I see coming by on LinkedIn with also terms of automation as well, but also different apps that can recognize sign language or stuff like that. There's a big way we can help. Yeah, I agree. I think the key thing though is that always censor it around people with disabilities. It's a lot of these sign language AI things are probably created by white able bodied cis hetero. This default human has led to believe. Whereas it's always, if you're working in accessibility, it's people with disabilities that should be leading and we should be assisting. And when you mentioned about the research thing, if you have stories or snippets or things, you should always bring those, you should hear first-hand from people. So that's how you can help with helping your teams to understand what accessibility is, why it's important and why we're doing it. And then as accessibility grows within your organizations, it's again, it's about employment. Higher people with disabilities, it brings a personal thing to the problem. It's kind of like, we're not solving problems for this person that we don't see first-hand. I had the ability to work with people with disabilities and to see first-hand. But if you have a person that's working in HR that is blind, then you are solving problems for this person that you work with. It makes it more personable. And one of my clients, for instance, I work with another accessibility consultant and he's blind. And we work together on the design system. And I think that's awesome. The fact that we've got a blind person working on the design system, it brings into question, "Okay, so what is design?" Because people think of design very much as a visual language and design is way beyond the visual language. And I think by recognizing that fact helps the organizations to move on that journey. And about this journey, so you've worked with a lot of big companies, a lot of different ones as well, different sectors. Some may be a more mature than others. Derns of accessibility. What are some things you recognize from a company that is really mature? First is a company that's maybe just starting out. Having dedicated people working on the team is very helpful. One of the companies that I support at the moment is Skye Scana. They have a dedicated accessibility lead, Heather, who is awesome and an engineer lead as well, Gert. And they're both people that know the importance of accessibility and help others in the organization recognize it. And so from that, they're able to internally create a Champions Network where other people are involved in that in understanding what impacts their roles have and how they can help. And it just balloons. That knowledge is not just within one person or one advocate. It becomes a big, big wider thing. But to get there, you definitely need, you can't try and do a bottom-up approach, but realistically, it's going to be coming from management to say this important. And that is really, really helpful. Because it helps generate budget. It helps generate awareness. And that will also end up with your maturity level increasing. So if permanent people are science, senior management, a science to accessibility, for budget and capacity and stuff like that. And then throughout through this Champions Network, you can find some people that also want to work on accessibility and that you can inspire. And coming together and working together, discussing problems and solving them. Yeah, that's also something I recognize with the main organization. I think there's companies out there like Intuit, Ted Drake, who I think pretty much came up with this model and mocked LaPolla eBay. And you can see the impacts of the maturity of these organizations. And they, the benchmark. I think what's really nice as well with Skyscan and so from my own personal perspective is, you know, I would attend an accessibility event and I would hear somebody outside of the sector talking about Skyscan as being an organization to look up to. And I think that's really good to recognize as well that by doing this, you reach not only a wider audience, but people recognize what you're actually doing as well. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Sure. But so Skyscan has been prioritising accessibility for a longer time than already way or for how many years you've been with them. So I've been supporting Skyscan for around about three years. And I think how there's probably been in the lead position for four or five years. And yeah, you can see over time, you know, what's how that's evolved. And the conversations that we have are different as well. And the problems that we're trying to solve are different. So for many organizations who are very early in their journey, you know, conversations may talk about color contrast. They may talk about these fairly low hanging fruits. They may talk about, okay, how do we make this an improved experience for visually impaired screen media users? You know, more mature organizations, we're thinking about things like how do we include this, include people with vestibular disorders into this? How do we make sure that the button that we have created works not only for visually impaired screen media users, but also includes people who use voice as their input. So there's lots of different discussions that you have when the maturity level is a little bit higher than you have less mature organizations. There's this thing called accessibility by design. So if you would start like a new project or a new completely redo something, you have the opportunity to do accessibility from the start. What are some processes you think are good to incorporate into your development life cycle? To reach something like accessible by design? Yeah, I think one of the things that I would try and focus on is that we talk about inclusion a lot in what we do. And maybe I'm a little bit competitive, but I think there's an opportunity to talk about exclusion. And it kind of changes the perspective of people when you actually use that word. And so if you're doing a kick off meeting for a new project or a new feature or whatever, RubyHands, it's like who are we going to exclude today? It changes the dynamic of the room. But it also changes the conversation a little bit because we don't want to exclude people. Our company doesn't exclude people yet we do unwillingly. So if you can think about things like almost the opposite of what you're trying to do, then it kind of helps to actually ensure that that doesn't happen. So that's one thing. The other thing that I think is really important as well, is the start is again, and maybe repeating myself a little bit here, but it's also recognizing the fact that it's why we're doing it. It's not for legal, it's not for all these purposes that we tend to focus on, is because we want to make something work for people with disabilities. And so I think framing the discussions early on is kind of like a key thing to help you move forward a little bit easier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Including, including and testing with people with disabilities, I think it's something you've mentioned a couple of times. And I think it's also very important to do. With my organization, we have two main accessibility testers. They both have a visual impairment, so they use, they are really advanced using the screen reader and Maria controls. And that's so really eye opening to see that from, well, just working together with them and testing. So, yeah, they're just colleagues of mine. And so this is really, yeah, they are really accessible to me as well, which is really nice. But also, sometimes it's harder to find people from outside of the organization to test the product with. How would you handle something like connecting with the right people? How do you do this? Yeah. I mean, it depends on budget, of course. There are agencies out there that it's that it's that main goal to recruit people like Fable, for instance, in Canada. You know, when I head next to no budget or low budget, you kind of like do as much kind of good real testing because you can and you find methods to try and recruit people with disabilities to take part in the tests. So, an assistive way, for instance, one of the things that I did was all, sorry, one of the things that they did before I arrived was that they had two Facebook groups for people that use the app and for also for people like professionals. And so I would just send a message, it's like, hey, there's something I want to talk about. It's only really willing to to help me with this because that was something that I would do. I noticed somebody posted a LinkedIn from an organization I don't work for, but what they did was they just put that a call say, hey, we're trying to improve our experience with this. Is anybody willing to help us? And so these are fairly, you know, accessible ways to attempt to recruit people, of course. And then, you know, if you've got the budget, like I say, there are organizations out there that can certainly help you spend that budget. Yeah, definitely. Also, from what I see within our organization, how we connect. Also, our users, we have a lot of users in the Netherlands. So we try to connect with them. And most of the time they are willing to help out. Absolutely. You know, I find this as well, you know, ultimately we're, I look at everything as like, we're all on the same team trying to achieve an objective. And I think, you know, it's a good objective to try and achieve. So yeah, any kind of like ways to reach people, to include people in the discussions and ideally work with you on solving these problems is the way forward, I think. I think it's something that eventually, well, hopefully businesses will start to recognize that fact. It's great that you've got two internal people who are able to support you. And they're supporting you with, you know, the non-visual experience, which is, which is great. They're also expert users, as you mentioned. But, you know, it's recognizing the fact that everything is, you know, intersectional. There are visually impaired screen reader users who don't really know how to use a screen reader. There are people who are sighted who use a screen reader. So there are lots and lots of different kind of like people that we need to be talking to to ensure that we're considering the needs of others. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Looking into the future, maybe a little bit. What are some, do you see some notable trends, maybe in the accessibility space today, or that you would think are, maybe a good trend, or something that could help solve some problems? Notable and worrying, I think, are kind of aligned at the moment. So there's a lot of, there's a big shift to AI, which is going to solve everything apparently. And the reality is that with where we are at the moment, it's more problematic than anything else. You know, I don't know if you've used any kind of like language models to check code, and you may get some kind of like feedback, which looks semi-accessible, and then you realize that it's not accessible at all. And I think that kind of stuff is happening in the space. Lots of companies are claiming to improve automated accessibility testing because of AI. These are high, you know, these are noble claims, and you know, it's great when we get that, but we're not going to get that tomorrow if we ever get that, which I don't think we will. But to me, it's really nice if some of these companies do this or advertise what it is, because I can spot out the ones that are not serious to me. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I'm not going to do any name calling here, but it's also, it also gives you an idea of where the motivations lie as well. You know, is it about, is it really about making products as accessible as possible, or is it really about how many dollars you're going to bring into the organization, which sadly is, you know, it's something that needs to be raised within the accessibility community. And there are some players in the space who have shifted maybe more to the side that we don't really want them to shift to. Yeah. So with AI or more leaning negatively, going to be on it. No, I think, you know, it's, I think cautiously optimistic, rather negatively, but at the moment, we are not there. We're not going to be there tomorrow. And so I think AI can be useful to support accessibility efforts, but not lead accessibility efforts. I think AI could provide value in certain areas, certainly like for as long as you recognise the blind spots, which you have, that you have. So for instance, if you are looking at using AI for alternative text, then make sure that the alternative text that you are getting out of it is, is actually good alternative text. And it's not just something that AI has decided. Yeah. In some ways, it also kind of also speed up some processes. So for coming up with all text, for example, you still need to check it, of course, very, very, very, very much so, but it could speed you up a little bit. Same with, for example, got the name. Same with other processes that can be semi-automated with AI. And then you, of course, you need to check it thoroughly. And then, yeah, it could speed up your processes a little bit. One of the nice features or uses of AI, I've seen lately was from a colleague within my organisation. He is blind, but he's a back-end engineer. So he works on the back end of the A/B/N-A, with Java, I guess. He was showing me his way of working and how he's set up his coded editor and how he's using the different tools. And he was actually utilising the GitHub Co-Pilot in his editor quite a lot because he got some nice prompts ready to go to tell him,"Oh, this file, explain me what's happening in this file or something." That's what something was he was. To me, it looked very simple, but to him, the information that he got out of it was very useful for him and really improved his way of working. So that was really nice. Yeah. I think you've just got to have that knowledge to understand what you are seeing. And so, if you pump in some information, you pump in a prompt and you get something back, it's not a copy and paste kind of thing, you have to understand what has been presented here. And at the moment, from what I've seen, there's a lot of things that come out of these, language models are very much, they could be accessible, they may look as though they're accessible, but without recognising what defects they could be introducing is, I mean, I'm sure you saw the uproar about Figma sites with the code that they were made with pumping out. Some nice diffs, lots of diffs and lots of aria, which wasn't needed. All of these things that were, if you don't know anything about that side of things or if you do, but don't think about accessibility, don't consider it, then you're just polluting the web even further than the door it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, call it sometimes the big inflation of elements, HTML elements. Also, now, front and front works, it's very easy to just go big on creating a lot of HTML, a lot of codes, rapidly, just bloating the web with lots of different things, which mostly are not accessible. Yeah, also, of course, if the site on the I that it's trained on a lot of stolen data. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's lots of things where you have to be very, very aware, and also it's kind of like, what is it, sorry, what is the data that is you've collected, what are the bar, what are the things that you have not considered as part of that data? So it's going beyond accessibility. You know, you think about, this I can't remember the name now, but there are AI specialists, which are people of color who basically said that the training data that you're getting is excluding myself. And so, who else are you excluding with that training data? People with disabilities will be excluded for sure, but there's a wide range of people that will be, will be kind of like knots, not involved in that discussion or not involved in that data, where they need to be involved in that. Yeah, yeah, definitely. All right. I think we are about to wrap up. So, the last things I always ask to my guests are share some last inspiring message to folks out there, just some fellow accessibility people working on UX, maybe engineering as well, or some other part. Sometimes can be very hard to work on accessibility, especially if I look to myself, if you try to do inspire or reach out to a lot of different teams at the same time, try to help them in various different ways, can be daunting also because the progress might seem slow a little bit. Yeah, what would you say to these people? You know, it's baby steps, any change that you're doing, as long as it's a positive change in the right direction. So even if you are a designer that's working on a product and you tweak your source and to make sure that this is a little bit bigger or as a contrast changes. Yeah, that's an impact. You're going to have a positive impact on somebody. You may not be recognising that because you don't have the user research to back the note, but you are making that impact. And I think the other thing that I probably would really highlight, and I think this comes from the UX background, is the fact that it is about the experience and so in accessibility, we often say we are being accessible, but being accessible is often short-hand for compliance. We are working compliant and being accessible is not working at compliance. And so, you know, recognising that conformance does not equal experience is probably something else that's really useful. Yeah, yeah. All right, thank you. The last question, so how, now that I think about it, so how accessible is not linked to that VKAC? Of course, how, how, but being accessible is something you can achieve at all, or is there always something to do, or how far away from being accessible, like on a high maturity level, I would say, away from WAKER, for example, how long of a path do you think there is to improve? Do you see WAKER also as a baseline, and where you, these are the default basic things you need to do, and then a lot of user research. Absolutely. I mean, I mean, WAKER as it purposes, and it's, you know, glad that it's there, but it's also is part of the, you know, what we're trying to do. Yeah, I think, you know, if you look at the accessible design, if you look at the universal design, you know, the thinking about that is to make things work for as many people as possible. It's not building for everybody, because it's not possible to build for everybody. But if you can recognise what people you are excluding, and if they are excluded, then what can you do to try and remove those barriers? I think those are really key things to to achieve. Thanks again. Thanks for joining us. If people want to find you online, where we're going to find you, pretty much linked to, like, S's, the easiest place to find me. And then, yeah, the Accessibility Slack channel, which most of the Accessibility communities will already be about for all, usually in those places. All right, great. Thank you so much. Thanks for all the insights and great conversation. I have to listen to this. If you like what we do, please consider liking, subscribing, whatever following us. And to keep up to date with the latest episodes, and I hope to see you next time as well. Thanks. Thanks again.[BLANK_AUDIO]