Advocacy Talks Episode 14 – A deep dive into your digital accessibility rights

In this episode Madeleine spoke to Adela Buliman, Chief Accessibility Officer with Vially, about the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and the recent IAAP conference that they co-hosted at the Wayfinding Centre in Dublin recently. The discussion centred around the importance of users flagging to businesses issues with their services or systems and making complaints to the relevant regulator when there is non-compliance with the Act. You can find a list of all the EAA Regulators here.

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Welcome to Advocacy Talks, a podcast from the advocacy team at Vision Ireland. Here's what's coming up on this episode. A lot of the member state governments didn't put a lot of effort into letting organisations and businesses know that this was coming. For instance, Ireland actually missed the deadline for imposing it into law and did it late. So it wasn't until really about a year, half a year before the Act came into force that we saw people find out about it and start really panicking about it as well. And now here's Madeleine McNamara. Hello everybody and welcome to Advocacy Talks and thank you so much for tuning in again. You may remember that last month I spoke to Michael Grimes from Cannon Island and we had a really interesting conversation all about the recent photography exhibition that took place in the photo museum in Dublin where they kind of were showcasing tactile images of photographs along with other accessibility features like audio description and braille and avalanche. So it was a really interesting conversation. So if you missed that, do listen back to that. Well today I'm joined by Adela Bullerman who is the Chief Accessibility Officer for Viale. So Adela, welcome to Advocacy Talks. Thanks Madeleine, I'm glad to be here. Oh we're delighted to have you and it's always a pleasure to talk to our technology experts. So I think maybe to start off with we might just ask you, can you tell us for those who don't know who is Viale and what do you do? So Viale is a subsidiary of the Vision Ireland group. So we're kind of like a little subsection and our focus is specifically on digital accessibility. So I think the reason that Viale was created was first of all so that people didn't assume we just tested for sight loss because it's actually a pan disability approach that we have and also to have that kind of separate focus on the digital side of things. So a lot of what we do is we do audits and training and user testing for anything that's digital whether it's like a website or a document or a piece of hardware like an ATM or a payment terminal. Oh so it's quite broad then actually, it's kind of wider than people might think. It's not just the websites and things, it is all those other aspects as well and what apps and things obviously come under that too. Yeah so when we first started it was the web accessibility directive had just been announced which was for public sector and they only have to deal with websites, apps and documentation. So that was initially our primary focus but since the European Accessibility Act has come in we've kind of expanded to include some of the more things that are in scope on that side as well. Yeah well that brings some very nicely to that because the European Accessibility Act has been in force now since June last year, the end of June last year, which is you know what a good six months or more now and what actually is it just for people who may not have heard of it yet? What is involved with that? So this is a proper EU Act so compared to say the web accessibility directive that was kind of just regulations, this is an Act that can be kind of enforced by law so there's a regulator for each sector within each member state of the EU and there's some really specific sectors that have been called out in scope of it. The point of the Act is to make sure that critical services are accessible to everyone so that's why it mentions really specific sectors like banking, payments, audio visual media services, e-commerce, transport, so it's really honed in on what do you actually need day to day to live your life the same as everybody else and it covers a really broad range so it's generally the entire service so instead of just focusing on a website or app they go okay a banking service that whole thing needs to be accessible and that might be phone calls to support, that might be chatbots, it might be emails and letters and ATMs and so on so it encompasses basically everything you need to interact with that organisation that's in scope. So it is it sounds very broad actually isn't it and you know companies had a long time kind of a lead-up you know before the Act was kind of brought into force but have you found that there has been any improvements you know all companies kind of doing what needs to be done to be in compliance with the Act? Yeah I've seen most improvement I think in terms of attitude and probably budget allowance for organisations so although there was a lot of kind of lead-up time there was very little known about this Act so I think a lot of the member state governments didn't put a lot of effort into letting organisations and businesses know that this was coming for instance Ireland actually missed the deadline for imposing it into law and did it late so it was until really about a year half a year before the Act came into force that we saw people find out about it and start really panicking about it as well as much as we'd been telling people for years they kind of only started panicking right before it and then they found that there's very little information on it even law firms were kind of scrambling to kind of understand it and the regulators themselves hadn't yet put in their own processes and so on so it was very slow moving however what I can see now is that when someone in an org organisation goes up top and says I need some budget to do this they're finding it much easier to get that when they also say oh well there's a law now and you can be sued and someone can go on Joe Duffy and say blah you know they're discriminating and it's illegal and so on and it can go to the circuit court so it's easier for people to get budget to actually implement things. Well that is good to hear that you know people are finally kind of getting to grips with it and whatever but it is very disappointing you know that there wasn't as you say we were talking in the office and we were kind of reminiscing that when you know GDPR was coming in everybody the dog in the street knew what GDPR was about because it was so important you know that everyone had to be compliant with that and this is as important yet the knowledge outside of the sort of the kind of those in the know in the disability community just just seemed seems very low compared to that. Yeah and I think it is disappointing because as much as GDPR is important it's almost not as important in my eyes I mean of course data protection is important but if you compare that with 20% of the population is not allowed to independently bank or buy things that's huge that's crazy that we even like say that so ideally there would have been a bit more uptake but I think the reality is that most people just don't understand accessibility at all you know if you go to someone and say you need to make sure your mobile app works for blind people they'd probably turn around and go blind people can use phones you know so how are they meant to make it accessible if they don't even understand the community. Yeah that's very worrying isn't it that's why you know hopefully maybe if we can get this podcast out there a bit wider as well and you know get it into the sphere and I guess that's what this is all about it's kind of advocating to raise that awareness in general to the importance of these things and what it means because as you say if people don't understand you know that a blind person can even use a phone then there's a long way to go I think isn't there to kind of really bring these things where they should be. Yeah absolutely but we are seeing that improvement I mean compared to five years ago when I was still explaining what alt text is to every single person I spoke to now I have you know developers in banks calling me sharing their screen and showing me how they're using NVDA to move around the new new web content there they've created so it's we're definitely seeing an improvement in in that awareness it's just still going to take a while if you take even one bank say they might have 40 different websites and apps because they've so many different areas they might have insurance and even that is split into home insurance and car insurance and so on they've 10 different savings accounts etc they have a huge amount to go through um but I'm hoping that in a couple of years we'll really start to see the effect of the work that they're doing now. I hope so I really do hope so and you know we're so pleased that we've got people like yourselves doing this work to really try to you know help companies to get on board and just for anyone who doesn't know hopefully people do but alt text is basically to where you have a description of an image so people who can't see the image get that sort of description of what what's happening. Can you you know you mentioned briefly there about regulators and you know this is kind of going across a number of different industries and so who is all the regulators for the EAA in in Ireland? So it depends on the industry but for banking it's the central bank of ireland and so they're all kind of payments and banking side of things then we have comreg um for all the kind of telecom side of things and that donal rice from the he used to be in the national disability authority now leads the EAA piece in comreg and so they're probably one of the regulators that is most set up and most you know understand best what's happening and what they kind of have to regulate and then we have ccpc who have the broadest kind of scope because they have all physical products plus all of e-commerce which is you know the vast majority of the in scope um organizations we also have the nta then for transport and the iaa for aviation specifically um i might have missed one or two there but basically each each one has their own um it's a lot it's a lot it is a lot there is a gov.ie webpage about it and you can see all of the different regulators and links off to those regulators websites and information about the eaa and how they enforce it and so on so those regulators you say are hopefully enforcing the regulations and it seems to be though that it's only if someone kind of highlights something to them that they might go and look or are they actively you know scrutinizing what's happening within businesses do you think they i think they've mostly taken the approach of waiting until someone flags something and that's especially in the ones where there's a huge amount of things to regulate especially if you think of say ccpc who have thousands of businesses under them um in scope they would i would expect be waiting for a couple of complaints against the same organization then they would go investigate them and then they would go to them and and you know ask them to to fix what is wrong or else be fined so therefore it really highlights the importance of people making complaints i guess to try to ensure that these things are brought into line because as well until we see case law in ireland it's difficult to really tell how enforcement will go because that tends to be the way irish courts work is you have the first big case and then that kind of sets the precedent for how those cases are dealt with in the future so we kind of want to have an initial case um so that i i guess it will almost maybe spur people into action a little bit we have one in france that i know about but i'm not sure of how many others across the eu have come in for the eaa so far that was a supermarket i think wasn't it in france yeah so it was four major supermarkets um but they they were all sued together actually and so it's the four biggest ones so do you think that it has to be then though so somebody makes a complaint to the regulator and they go in and do whatever hopefully try to you know so it's the regulator presumably has powers to do they have powers to impose um penalties if yeah so yeah each member state has their own fines and penalties that they've decided um but the commission has told them that the main protocol is to get organizations to comply and actually fix things so the way ireland are approaching it is they're generally what they're going to do is say we found you to be non-compliant you now have six months to do this and if you don't then at that point you will be fined if the you know organization still then even after that will not comply and they're refusing to do the work then it can become a court case whereas other countries are doing it slightly differently for instance i think one of the scandinavians are fining you every single day until you become compliant um so you can see people comply a lot quicker there i like the sound of that can we not get out here that sounds good i think that would definitely get them to get a move on yeah i can see that working a bit better was we seem to be taking a much more softly softly approach it's kind of you know we hope you're gonna do it and you know yeah um i think that's why advocacy is so important um because it's all well and good you know me knocking on people's doors and viali and and so on but if it's the actual people coming and saying i want to give you my money and you're my money and you're not letting me that's that just sounds different you know it comes across differently absolutely so just just to really you know put this home for people that they need to be making the complaint and the first protocol would be the regulator you think or would it be maybe firstly to the actual business or would you go directly to the regulator i think you can go to the regulator however i think it would probably you'd probably have a better argument if you went to the organization first um and then were as able to show their response probably yes and yes look it's been trimmed they promised me three months it still hasn't happened you know and now i'm officially complaining that might just work better um however if there are enough complaints coming in um you know to the regulator they are required to go investigate that themselves then okay so that's a rallying call to anyone in listening you know having issues with with particular businesses you know where you feel it's not compliant where you can't access you know the services that you're you're trying to to use that you do make the complaints it's just so important you know because you know vision island and viali and other organizations are doing what they can in terms of trying to bring these things about but we really don't have the boots on the ground you know you're the people out there need to be be doing that all as well um to really get the message home i think to to the regulators and to the businesses to get things to be changed um so we had a recent conference then in the wayfinding center that yourselves and kind of hosted with um the iaap which is the international association of accessibility professionals i hopefully got that correct you did yeah uh and that was in february um this year and it was a great great event actually i got i was lucky enough to go to there was a two-day event and i was lucky enough to go to the second day of that so maybe you could just tell us a little bit about that yeah so this is um a conference that as you said we co-hosted with iwap they're a kind of global organization they're they're non-profit and their main aim is to just spread awareness about accessibility to help upscale accessibility professionals um and and really just get the word out there and give some kind of practical information they do a couple of eu events every year um and the last one i went to i was like i know there's so many people in ireland that would love this like when are you coming and i was told give me a date and a venue um so i of course went off and and um tried to organize it for the wayfinding center which is just one of the most amazing centers uh globally i think there there's nothing really quite like it um i mean they have a bus a tram a train an airport set up an actual airplane um and it's all about teaching um say architects and engineers how to make things more accessible and also providing a real life um setup where maybe someone with a disability can go practice or train their service animal or so on in a real life environment without the worry of it being unsafe or or so on um so i thought everything just worked really well together the iwap events and then the wayfinding center and our services and i thought we could make a really good um event so on the first day we did um firstly a tour of the center and then um all of the accessibility experts plus 17 different regulators from across the eu met and did a four-hour workshop around how to interpret different clauses of one of the um harmonized standards for accessibility so really deep diving into particular clauses and just seeing how different people interpret it how the end users feel about about that requirement and and how to test it uh and so on and and then day two was our more kind of open day i guess so we had um a lot more people there and um a stage with different speakers and so on so we tried again to get a good mix of we had regulators with people that were experts in mobile apps experts in self-service terminals etc we kind of tried to hit each area of the european accessibility act in the different industries that are in scope and something else that was really important is that we made sure that there was an end user with the actual lived experience in every single talk or panel um because generally that's probably the most important voice and the one that gets heard the least um so that was really what we wanted to do with the the event so there's a really long answer for your question no but it was great i was actually the second day because as you said the first day was much more for those you know professionals in that space and and the second day was as you say much more open and and it was it was fascinating and i really did appreciate all the just the different variety of discussions that took place and it was very noticeable you know that you had you know one or two at least um you know uh people with lived experience of disability you know in any of those panel discussions so it was fantastic um and it was great to sort of get a sense of the enthusiasm around uh accessibility and people trying to you know make things more accessible i know we were just talking kind of kind of negatively there before uh where you know enough isn't happening but at the same time there are there are many people who are trying and i think that's important to kind of remember as well um but i think it was great to have that kind of interaction where you know end users if you like were kind of posing questions as well and you know really asking those those organizations who think they're doing the the best thing well you know but what about this and what you know so it was kind of a really good i think for them to hear um whether or not their their their accessibility that they're providing is is actually working or or good enough so i i think it was it was very very good and from what i understand it was kind of the best attended iap conference they've had so far is that right yeah for definitely in the eu i'm not sure about the u.s ones but in the eu yes because they don't think they've managed to get such a large venue um before um so that was also really great and i think apparently more people come to dublin as well because they're expecting a fun time exactly who wouldn't want to come to dublin you know and even in the weather we were having i mean rain rain rain i don't think people were hoping for that but i know anyone i mean we had i think a yellow weather warning and like floods all over the city and we still had you know 100 people in a room saying please tell me about self-service terminals so i'm pretty pleased with that yeah absolutely no it was great and it was so well run it was just so professional and you know i thought it was it was excellent so it was really great to see to see that happening and and to get the chance to to go to that i you know was really grateful for that being being on the doorstep as you say so yeah congratulations to everyone involved in that absolutely thank you well thank you so much it's really been you know great to kind of talk about you know the conference but also the a and try to really push home for people the importance of you know making those complaints and you know it's not it's only going to be by that that things are going to begin to change i think if if if voices are heard so thank you really do appreciate it you've been amazing great thanks mani you're very we're very pleased to have you always on on advocacy talks anytime so look thank you everyone for listening today if you need any sort of help and support in general from vision island you can always check out our website which is www.vi.ie or you can call our info line on 1-800-911-250 and hopefully we'll talk to you soon bye for now thanks for listening to advocacy talks to get in touch with our advocacy team send us an email to campaigns at vi.ie or why not join one of our local advocacy networks where you can work together with others to solve some of the biggest problems facing blind and partially sighted people in ireland thanks for listening and see you next time