Transcript of "Digital accessibility, with Jonathan Hassell"

[Intro Music]

Clare: Hello and welcome to Making Tech Better, Made Tech’s fortnightly podcast bringing you content from all over the world on how to improve your software delivery. My name is Clare Sudbery, my pronouns are she and her and I am a lead engineer at Made Tech.

At Made Tech we are very focused on the users of the software that we build, so I was very excited to be able to speak to Jonathan Hassell, who is an expert in digital accessibility. On Wednesday 28th July 2021 I spoke to Jonathan with the aim of honouring disability awareness day, which is actually on a Sunday, but this episode will be published two days later on 17th because we always publish our episodes on Tuesdays.

Clare: Hello Jonathan!

Jonathan: Hi Clare, delighted to be with you.

Clare: Fantastic. Jonathan is an expert in digital accessibility. That’s why we’re speaking to him today. I’m going to leap straight in with the first question that I ask everybody which is who in the IT industry are you inspired by?

Jonathan: There is a guy called Mark Webb. I met him a couple of years ago, just before lockdown happened. I was introducing him at a panel at a diversity and inclusion event. He works for Shift MS. They are a charity for community for people with Multiple Sclerosis. One of the things I love about Mark is that he’s so positive. He is the positive story that I tell everybody. He didn’t start off with that particular condition, or it certainly worsened. He tells it brilliantly himself. Whilst he was at Dixon’s Car Phone, quite high up there, his MS developed. He has a whole story about how he moved into social media, actually because of that and all of the changes that were needed for his job.
The story is amazing, you can find it on our website. Also, he is doing a huge amount to take accessibility and disability into the world of PR and marketing, which is one of the most important worlds because they are the people that communicate with us all the time. Mark Webb, check out his Disability at the Table podcast. It’s absolutely awesome and I’m not just saying that because I was his first guest, honestly.

Clare: Brilliant, I love it. You have a whole career in accessibility and digital accessibility. You run a company. How did you get to this point? Why is this the thing that you are devoting your life to?

Jonathan: A couple of things happened at the same time, around about the turn of the century. The first one was my nephew Carl was born with Spina Bifida. That’s the condition that he has that means he uses a wheelchair. He plays a lot of wheelchair basketball. Like a lot of people with a disability, his condition actually impacts a number of things. He uses a wheelchair, and he has a slight learning delay, and he is also slightly autistic. I knew, if you like, the world of disability.

Pretty much bang on the same time, I started a job at the BBC. My job was Editor of Standards and Guidelines. My job was to try and work out what good quality was for the BBC’s websites, mobile apps, red button services, iPlayer, all of that sort of stuff. Literally in my first week, my boss came to me and said, ‘The BBC has always cared about disability.’ Subtitles on TV, that sort of thing. In the world of digital, we need to be as good for people who are paying their license fee. It’s your job to work out what good looks like and to explain it to everybody who was working on the four hundred websites. So many different mobile apps, so many different things we were doing. How did all of those get good? As a result of that, I was asked to Chair a committee for the British Standards Institute, to come up with a British standard for how to do that.

I pulled together a lot of people from not just the BBC but lots of disability charities, lots of organisations in the UK who had been on this journey of how to get good at accessibility. It was a great ride at the BBC for ten years. We really did get good. The last thing was publishing the British Standard – BS8878 – in 2020. At which point I felt my job was done there, really. It was a good time to move on. That’s when I set up Hassell Inclusion, to try and help lots of other companies go on that same journey.

Clare: Fantastic, that’s a great story, I love it. Digital accessibility is such a big topic, there are so many different things to think about with digital accessibility. What are the biggest misconceptions?

Jonathan: One of the first things I did when I started Hassell Inclusion was come up with an accessibility myths blog. I think we had sixteen in there. Cutting that down. The two things I would really want to say – most people think that disability is about disabled people and that’s it. It isn’t really. It’s as much about my mum who is 80, who doesn’t consider herself to have a disability. Yet she has dry eyes. She’s not blind but her sight is degrading over time. She can’t read a book because she can’t read the words very well. So, number one: accessibility is not just about people with disabilities. It’s older people, it’s me when I’m cooking. When I’m trying to make a chicken curry and I am cutting up chicken and the music that’s playing in the background is not the track I want. I say, ‘Hey Alexa, next track.’ I don’t have a disability myself at the moment but sometimes I am doing something else with my hands or my eyes or whatever.

Really importantly, it’s not just 20 percent of the population that have a disability, it’s not even just 40 percent of the population – that 20 percent with a disability and 20 percent who are older. It’s actually everybody. We all need this stuff because we want to use technology the way we want to use it, whenever we are using it.

That’s number one. Number two, hopefully that gives people a bigger understanding of why that’s so important. The big thing is that most people, over time, have figured that accessibility was only important because they didn’t want to be sued. The Equality Act here in the UK, the American Disabilities Act in the States, all of these different things. If you don’t do accessibility, a disabled person is going to sue you. That doesn’t make anybody come alive and say yay, I really want to do that.

It’s actually about people. There are so many benefits that can come from getting this right, rather than just the benefit of sleeping better at night because you know you’re not going to be sued. If you get this right, you make more money as a business. That’s the way it works.

Clare: Fantastic, I love that. When you start thinking about accessibility, there are so many different ways in which you can make a product accessible. There are so many different ways in which a product might be inaccessible to different people for different reasons. Sometimes when you start considering all of the different requirements that people might have, it can seem overwhelming. You can find yourself in a situation where in order to make a product more accessible for one set of people, you might actually be making it less accessible for another set of people. For instance, there’s more than one kind of colour blindness. There is more than one set of colours that are problematic for different users. People who have hearing impairments will have very different requirements to people who are partially sighted.
How do you cater for all of those conflicting requirements?

Jonathan: That’s a great question, really insightful. The answer is a couple of things really. The first thing is that where you have conflict, it’s really important to think about how many people have each of those different choices. I’ll give you the easiest thing for most people to understand – colour. What colours do I want my website to look like? If my sight is going, I want my website to look like Heathrow Airport signs. High visibility, stuff that everybody can see from a long way away. The colours are really contrasting, so for people with a vision difficulty, that’s really good. Black background, yellow, really bright text on it. I’m guessing most companies don’t think that’s a great look for their brand. Even if it wasn’t just the company saying they don’t like that for their brand, if we take the other side of things, people who are dyslexic like pastel colours. They like the complete reverse to that. If you give them black text on a white background, they can have headaches because things are too contrasting for them.
So we have two different extreme cases there. Then companies’ brand departments that sit in the middle going well, what are we supposed to do about that then? We want our brand to have all of our brand values and appeal to all of the people out there, and you’re kind of saying we can’t. That’s us. One of the things you can do is you can say ok, we’re going to care for one of those groups of people and not the other one. Unfortunately, that’s what WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines does. When WCAG was being created, there were loads of people in the room who were putting their hand up for the needs of people with a vision impairment. The people who were representing people who were neurodiverse, people who are dyslexic or have autism, those sorts of things, weren’t invited to the party.

One way you could do it is to say we’re just going to care about these people and not those people. The other way is you can say we’re going to look at stats. How many people have that difficulty with vision? That’s around about 1.6 million people in the UK. Compare that to the number of people who are autistic or dyslexic, actually that’s more like 6 million. So actually, if we can’t give everybody what they want, let’s go to where the most people are.
The third way is the best way, which is personalisation. If you’ve done any user testing of a product and you’ve done personas and all of those sorts of things in usability, you’ll know that lots of different people want different things from the same website. It can be because they have a disability, or it could be because they are somebody that doesn’t have very much time.  We all want something slightly different. I want design for me. So do you and so does every single other people. The only way you are going to get design for me is personalisation. I want the computer to know something about me, and to use that to make my experience better. That’s the same thing really, for people with a disability. It just so happens that their needs are less understood and more extreme than everyone else’s.

Clare: Does that mean – going back to the example before about high contrast or low contrast – that you might need to say to people, you know what? If you need high contrast, you can press this button here, and you will actually get a different look to this site?

Jonathan: Yes, absolutely. When I was at the BBC, I did about three quarters of a million pounds of research on that. It really is the case that people want different things. The ability to say okay, you can have what you want, is really important. The only difficulty, and the thing that I would need to be really careful of here, is that there are a number of companies out there who claim to fix the accessibility of your website for free. You don’t need to get good at accessibility, you don’t need to learn how to do it and get it right, you can get it wrong and then you can put their thing on your website. They normally call it an overlay or a template. These are companies like accessiB. The tool that they have to personalise is great. Unfortunately, the idea that you can make something awful and then get artificial intelligence to fix it all has a huge number of problems.

For example, the National Federation of Blind People have come out quite recently saying that these things are actively bad for blind people. So, I would suggest that if anybody is interested in personalisation, have a chat with us before spending loads of money on a tool that you think might be your salvation when it comes to accessibility, but actually might get you into even more trouble.

Clare: Yes, these things have to be baked-in, don’t they? As a software engineer myself, as soon as we started talking about being able to give people a choice between what kind of contrast they see on the screen, I’m starting to think okay, you need to be able to have different skins. Then I’m instantly thinking that in that case, you need really clear separation between the presentation and the functionality.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Clare: Which means that your software needs to be well-designed.

Jonathan: I completely agree with you. What we are both saying is that making a website is not a simple task. There is a whole team that come together. If all of that team know what they are doing when it comes to accessibility, things are great. If a designer gets something wrong, then that’s problematic. If a developer gets something wrong, that’s problematic. Assuming that all of their jobs are so simple that some artificial intelligence can come along and fix everything at the end… It’s a little bit like what was happening in the 1980s in the car industry, where they would have this shed at the end. The production line would go through, and they wouldn’t be testing things as it went through. The car that would come out the other end would then effectively be fixed in the shed because there would be so many things wrong with it. Toyota came along and said that’s just crazy. Why are we making it bad and then trying to fix it at the end? That is the most inefficient process ever. What you really want is everybody who is making that car to know what they are doing, and to be testing their bit of what they did at that stage of the production line, all the way through. That’s what efficiency looks like. It’s not let’s get it wrong and then hope that we can fix it in the end. That’s not the way digital works.

Clare: Yes. You talked about things moving on the page. I instantly thought of newspaper sites. It absolutely boggles my mind that their websites are horrendous. They are so horrible. You are trying to find just a piece of information or find out about a news item. What you are faced with is the information you care about is taking up a very small portion of the screen, and everything else on the screen are these horrible adverts. There are videos, there are moving adverts, there are scrolling adverts. I don’t really understand. I mean obviously, it’s all about the advertising. The stuff that is distracting you is all advertising and clickbait, so I can see why they do it from that perspective. But it is such an unpleasant experience for just any user, never mind whether you have any special requirements. It must be an absolute nightmare from accessibility terms.

Jonathan: Yes. Just to give you a really specific thing, we did a lot of user research for the National Autistic Society a few years ago, to try and find out what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to digital. Because as I said previously, a lot of people who were neurodiverse weren’t really consulted when it came to working it out. A lot of their needs really aren’t in there, especially when it comes to people who are autistic. It’s a spectrum, so not everybody who is autistic agrees with what is good and what is bad. So, we asked 400 people, a survey. We then brought about 20 of them into focus groups. Actually, some of the things that we showed them were exactly what you are talking about.

We showed them articles from that day on the BBC website, the Guardian, and the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail and the Guardian, because they have adverts, they need to have adverts because it’s a really difficult business to be in, the journalism business at the moment, were an experience that the people we were speaking to really didn’t like. The Daily Mail is dreadful. It’s almost like if you want to know what not to do from a usability or accessibility perspective, that is the Daily Mail. It’s the videos, there was a lack of white space, they crammed as much as humanly possible onto the screen. It was distracting, overwhelming, it was all of the things that a lot of people just really dislike.
If you compare that to the BBC, for example, which has the luxury in these days of the license fee, they don’t have to put adverts on there. Everything is a lot calmer; you don’t get distracted. Things like; the use of white space, the use of character spacing and line spacing especially, how long paragraphs are, and all of these sorts of things are better done.

You have to balance these things. I’m not saying that The Daily Mail is wrong, I’m saying that a lot of people I know really don’t like it. But it feels like they are going after a different audience if you like. The great thing about news is that you can get it from a lot of different sources.

The other thing was the level of information. Not just the populism but actually, the reading age. This is the sort of place where The Daily Mail potentially has it over on the other guys. The Guardian is thinking highbrow, whereas the average reading age in the UK is 11. If you really want to know how to get across information in a simple way, go to The Sun. They really know how to write a very good headline.

I’m delighted that we’ve got a multiplicity of ways of getting information but I guess the key thing I would say from an accessibility perspective, is if people want your information and they can’t get it because the way you are presenting it is not what they need, then thinking a little bit more about if you could change that with a few things, to get more of that audience onside, you would actually have more subscribers and make more money.

Clare: That’s fascinating to me. A journey that I am currently on myself is that I am more and more concluding that I am probably autistic. That thing of being overwhelmed by unnecessary detail, easily distracted by just too much information on the page, that may well be relevant. It seems to me there must be lots of people who would struggle with that. Also, a general understanding about web design is that you don’t want your page to be too cluttered. Every time I visit one of these sites, I think it must work in some way or they wouldn’t be doing it.

I guess what you are saying is that in that sense, there has been a trade-off and the trade-off is that we care more about advertising, it makes more of an impact to our business than these other considerations, so that is the thing that we are prioritising.

Jonathan: Nobody makes a website to try and keep out 20, 40 percent of the potential people using it. Nobody would actively do that. The difficulties come in the trade-off. I want to use that new technology and unfortunately, the people who created that new technology haven’t made it accessible yet.

Clare: Yes.

Jonathan: There is no other option. So, I either don’t do that cool new thing on my website because 20 percent of the audience can’t use it or I do it hoping that the world will get better over time. How much time have I got to test things? I just need to get my product out there right now. These are the key realities of what digital is all about. Everything that I have done in the accessibility sphere and taking that British Standard through to the International Standard ISO30071 part 1, is to try and help not the technical people so much, but actually to help the people who own the product. Or the people who are doing their resource management and the budgets for it. How do we make decisions in those really tough points where you can’t do A and B, and you have to make a choice? Or you have to work out how far do we go, how far is enough?

There hasn’t really been enough information out there that actually says these things aren’t cheap. These things are unbelievably expensive. These things are intrinsically great, but we can’t do them yet. Everything that we do at Hassell Inclusion is to try and help organisations tackle those sorts of real world resource, budget constraint type issues in a way that actually understands the sorts of users they may have. Understands the sorts of business models they may have and tries to get them to a sweet spot where everybody wins. That is what we are looking for, always.

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Clare: While I’ve got your attention, let me tell you a bit about Made Tech. After 21 years in the industry, I am quite choosy about who I will work for. Made Tech are software delivery experts with high technical standards. We work almost exclusively with the public sector. We have an open source employee handbook on GitHub, which I love. We have unlimited annual leave. But what I love most about Made Tech is the people. They’ve got such passion for making a difference and they really care for each other.

Our Twitter handle is @madetech. That’s M A D E T E C H. We have free books available on our website at madetech.com/resources/books. We are currently recruiting in London, Bristol, South Wales, and the North of England via our Manchester office. If you go to madetech.com/careers, you can find out more about that.

Here is a quick reminder that before the break we were saying it’s important to be aware that there will be trade-offs when considering digital accessibility.

Clare: It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the volume of different accessibility requirements. Clearly people do have to make trade-offs. How do you make those decisions, and are there any obvious ways that you can make digital products accessible, which will be quick and easy and cheap?

Jonathan: Anecdotally, just to be really concrete for a while, if you are a designer, getting colour contrast right is always a good idea. That one, you can find a tool for free. Just put in ‘colour contrast analyser’ into Google and you’ve got a tool that helps you with that and costs you nothing. It doesn’t take long, either. Until you need to change something in the brand, and that can take a very long time.

Clare: We spoke about contrast earlier and we said that different people have different contrast needs. Those colour contrast analysers, what kind of thing are they considering?

Jonathan: They are considering the stuff that is there in the guidelines. They are not so good for people who are neurodiverse. What tends to happen is that people who have a vision impairment were really, really politically proactive in saying if you don’t give us what we want, that’s wrong and we’re going to be locked out of society. So, we need a law and some guidelines on our side to make sure that doesn’t happen. If you don’t get it right, we are going to come after you and we are going to sue you.

I seem to collect best friends who are dyslexic. Most of them don’t really want anybody to know about it, so they’re not going to sue you. Because they are not going to sue, most people have completely forgotten that they even exist or they have a particular point of view or preference.

The good thing made by dyslexia.com, Richard Branson, Kiera Knightley, a lot of great stuff is actually coming out in the media now. My Apple News has been showing me a really great article about someone with ADHD talking about their experiences. A lot of people who are autistic are more comfortable in actually saying this is the way I look at the world. This is what I like, and this is what I don’t like.

For me, saying that they are not there in the guidelines and they’re not going to sue me actually doesn’t make any commercial sense.

So, I would really encourage organise to start with the guidelines and then actually go with the people. Start getting your colour contrast right. Things like Hemingway app. Put the text into there and see what age you would need to be to actually read this. Is your information too complicated?

Clare: You spoke about modern technology sometimes causing problems. People want the latest technology but because it’s brand new, it may not yet be totally accessible. In the public sector, people are encouraged not to build JavaScript into their websites. Part of that is around accessibility. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Jonathan: I want to know what year we’re in, personally. We are in 2021, yes? So, there’s a streak of what I would term Luddism that has been in accessibility for ages. It actually has very little to do with users and all to do with tech geeks. The idea that the web should be confined to what it was ten years ago, fifteen years ago, when it was just a simple means of here’s some information and the most complicated interactive thing is a form, is stupid from my perspective.

Actually, it’s not good for accessibility either. If you look at people who don’t like JavaScript, in general they are people who are blind who use a screen reader. Things that get too complicated interactively because they can’t see it, is really difficult. They have been dictating a lot of the accessibility agenda. If you then think about people who don’t like words because they can’t read them, is a video more or less accessible than text? For most people in the universe, it’s more accessible. But if you look at WCAG, they make you think that video is almost evil.

What I would suggest is don’t be constrained by guidelines, be constrained by our imagination and our understanding of who are audience is, and what we can do to give them a great experience. There is nothing wrong with JavaScript. Absolutely nothing wrong.

Clare: Interesting, thank you. I know that one of the arguments about JavaScript is that sometimes it can be harder to access a site that’s using JavaScript if you are in a place with poor internet. On a train, is the obvious one. Again, that could be anybody. One of the arguments is that if your site relies on JavaScript, then that can take longer to download, and it can be more of an issue.

Jonathan: You have conflated two things together there, in my mind. What you are talking about is page weight and how long something will take to load. My gut is that the stuff I would be in completely in agreement with you that we need to get rid of JavaScript is that people are using JavaScript libraries when they don’t need to.

Overuse of JavaScript without reason? Yes, absolutely. But at the same time, most people who are trying to do stuff on the web in a start-up, in a small company or whatever, the only way that they can use it is because they piggyback on somebody else’s components. Whether it’s WordPress, Angular JS, React, whatever it is. These are ways of getting cool things happening on the web quickly. That’s okay. We just need to make sure that we do it thoughtfully and accessibly, and that accessibility doesn’t get forgotten.

Clare: Yes. So, what would your top three pieces of advice be to somebody who wants to make sure their digital product is accessible?

Jonathan: I’m going to start from a managerial perspective, which is know your audience and also know your product. Who is going to be using this thing, and are we just talking about your website, or are we talking about your intranet, are we talking about your mobile app? Just making one of those things accessible and forgetting about the other one gives people a really bad experience. So, have consistency of experience, that’s number one. That’s for the product managers.

There are loads of things that developers need to do. You guys have got it hardest because there is a lot of technical stuff. Just simple things like keyboard accessibility are probably where I’d start because anybody can test it. Everyone has got a keyboard. Literally, press the tab key on your keyboard on the website and see what happens. If you can see the little indicator going all the way through and if it makes sense to you, the chances are you’ve got it right. If it disappears at any point, there is a problem there. The chances are, somebody probably coded that element wrongly.

Content authors, check your reading level. Designers, simplicity. Try and make sure the page doesn’t have too much on it and that there’s good space for things to breathe. Get your colours right but also be consistent. Make sure that your navigation doesn’t change between pages. Most people get this sort of stuff right these days.

I think in general, the last thing I would say is that if you are using one of those quick ways of getting you to the website you want, whether it’s a JavaScript library, a content management system or for that matter, just a full software-as-a-service product that you have bespoked, is that an okay thing to do? Have the people who created that thing done the accessibility so that you can rely on it? Because if they haven’t, then if you test that thing, the problem is that you can’t fix it.

Understand that the tools you use to short-circuit your route to a good website actually have accessibility baked in already.

Clare: Yes, fantastic, thank you. It’s bothering me that we barely talked about colour blindness because it runs in my family. My father and son are both colour blind. I am sure you will know better than me, I think I remember the figure of 8 percent being quoted.

Jonathan: Yes, and normally it’s men, for some reason that we don’t know.

Clare: I know!

Jonathan: Maybe you know, yes, tell me!

Clare: It’s all about XX and Y chromosomes. It lives on the X chromosome. Women have two X’s and men have an X and a Y. In the case of a man, if the X chromosome that they have carries the colour blind gene, then that means that they will be colour blind. In the case of a woman, if one of your X’s carries the gene, then as long as the other one doesn’t, the other one will dominate so you won’t be colour blind. In my case, I have two X’s, one from my mother and one from my father. The one that comes from my father carries the colour blind gene because my father is colour blind, but the one that comes from my mother doesn’t. So, I’m not colour blind. But for both of my sones, they had a 50:50 chance because I was going to give them one of my X’s. The question was which one? Would they get my mum’s X or my dad’s X? It turns out that one of my sons got my mum’s X, and one of my sons got my dad’s X. So, one of my sons is colour blind and the other one isn’t. There you go.

Jonathan: That’s very cool. You see, you come on these things to learn and that includes me. Thank you, that was really well described. It is a lot of people. The figure is around a about 8 or 9 percent of people are colour blind. Just touching on that for a second,  people should understand that when they are using colour. That’s the key thing. It’s really important that people get that red, yellow, and green, red/green colour blindness is the most common one. The reason we don’t have accidents all the time at traffic lights is because if you can’t tell the difference between the colours, you still know that you stop if the one at the top is lit, and you go at the one at the bottom. So, if they all look yellow, you can still get the information. That’s the thing that people need to get when it comes to conveying information. If you take the colour away, are you clueless, or is nothing missed other than that it looks a little less pretty?

Clare: Exactly.

Jonathan: That’s what people need to know.

Clare: And there are tools you can use to check your colours. As you say, if you give other information besides colour, so if you use shape and texture as well as colour then as you say, if you took the colour away, would this diagram still be meaningful. The worst thing for people who have a colour deficiency – apologies, I call it colour blind, I know people don’t like to use that term anymore, it’s simply because my father has always called it that. People who have a colour deficiency, it has a massive impact on them in places like schools. In geography, my poor son is still given maps to look at and charts and asked to draw conclusions based purely on shaded regions, which he isn’t able to do because he can’t tell the difference between two adjacent colours, which other people think are different. He doesn’t.

Jonathan: That to me is what discrimination looks like. That is horrific. That the teachers aren’t aware. That’s what it’s all about really. We do have a responsibility, anybody who is communicating, to try and make sure that as many people are able to get what we’re doing. That’s why when I agreed to come on your podcast, the first thing I did was check to see if there was a transcript.

Clare: And there is.

Jonathan: And there is, you do them all of the time and they are really good, because I’ve read quite a few of them. These things are responsibilities, but they are also opportunities. You are going to ask me a question in a minute about true or untrue and I wanted to know what other people had said. If I had to listen all the way through to try and find that information, it would have taken me about fifteen minutes. I downloaded transcripts, did a find on the word file, and found that information in less than 30 seconds. That’s good communication, as well as good accessibility. That’s what comes through. When you get good at this it has so many side benefits.

Clare: I’m very glad that you noticed our transcripts because it was very important to me that we didn’t launch the podcasts until we were certain that we were going to have good quality transcripts for every episodes. Fantastic, I’m glad you noticed.

I am now going to ask you to tell me one thing that is true about you, and one thing that is untrue, as I ask all of our guests.

Jonathan: Sure. I thought I would go thematic. I love travel and like most people, have just not been able to do for the last year or so. I am watching the Olympics in Japan at the moment and just loving it, really. So, two things about Japan and me travelling to Japan, one true and one untrue. The first thing, the first time I went to Japan was to pick up the Japan Prize from their national broadcaster for a product that we did to help people who use the Makaton Sign Language. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that the first time I went to Japan was to sign off the International Standard ISO30071 part 1 that I spent most of the last decade working on. So, one of those is true and one of those is false.

Clare: Fantastic. What is the best thing that has happened to you in the last month or so? It can be either work-related or non-work related.

Jonathan: I thought about it long and hard and actually what I’m going to pick is the launch of HI Hub. Ever since Covid, we have really understood that a lot of organisations who don’t really know a lot about accessibility at all, maybe don’t actually have particular resources to devote to it, they really need to get this stuff right now. Because everyone was working from home, everyone was shopping from home. We started doing free webinars every month. Everyone kept on asking, that was so good, can we have the video? HI Hub is our resource that has an archive of all the videos that we’ve been doing for the last year. It’s got a lot of information in there as well about how to get buy-in for accessibility in the organisation you work for.

A lot of people come to us and say how do I get my boss to allow me to do this? That’s the key thing. So, HI Hub is really designed to try and help people with loads of free information so they can get good at this because it’s really needed now.

Clare: Fantastic. I often forget to say, actually, the reason I ask that question at the end of the podcast is just because I want to end on a high, I want to end on a feeling of positivity, so that’s great to hear about.
The very last question is where can people find you, and is there anything you want to plug?

Jonathan: Sure. HassellInclusion.com. I’ll spell that just in case people don’t know the particular spelling of my surname. H A S S E L L I N C L U S I O N.

HassellInclusion.com. You can find me and all the rest of my crew there. Anything I want to plug? We really do mean it when we say we want people to get good at this. We don’t want their to be as many barriers. Accessibility can be expensive, so here’s another free thing. I wrote two books to explain the International Standard that I spent so long working on because the Standard itself is quite complicated. The books enable you to understand how to get all of that right.

I’m going to send you a link so you can put it in the transcript and in the notes. If people click on the link, it will take them through to a page where they can put in their email, and we will send them a free copy. I’ve got two books, we’re going to send the one on products, for digital products. It basically says this is how to get your product team so they can do this accessibility thing in a really efficient way. The sort of stuff that we’ve been talking about. So yes, I don’t need any money. All I need is for people to download the book and use it, really, because that is what we are all about.

Clare: Wonderful, thank you so much.

Jonathan: You’re welcome.

Clare: Thank you for speaking to me, Jonathan, it’s been great, I’ve really enjoyed it.

Jonathan: It’s been a pleasure, I’ve really enjoyed it too, thank you.

[Music Sting]

Clare: As always, to help you digest what you’ve just heard, I’m going to attempt to summarise it.

Accessibility isn’t just about disabled people. We all need this stuff because we want to use technology the way we want to use it, whenever we’re using it. You shouldn’t be considering accessibility just because you are worried about being sued. It’s about paying attention to your customers. Ultimately, this is how to be an effective business.
Sometimes, you might find you have conflict between the needs of different users. For instance, high contrast is good for people with impaired vision, but bad for people who are dyslexic.

Be aware that the WCAG guidelines tend to be skewed towards those with impaired vision and doesn’t take so much notice of people who are dyslexic. When you do have conflicts between the needs of different users, ask the question how many people have each of the different challenges? Even better, offer personalisation.

Do be wary of products that claim to fix your accessibility after the fact. They rarely work and it is much better to bake flexibility in from the start.

Don’t assume complex language will be appropriate for all users. Don’t assume that you should have any written words at all. Videos can also be very effective. The key thing is to do everything you can to make sure that everyone can access the information you are trying to convey.

When making decisions about how to build in digital flexibility, you will find that sometimes you have to make conscious trade-offs. Think about the situation that you are in. What are your constraints, what is your budget, who are your users and what is your business model?

When trying to make your digital products more accessible, one of the simplest things that you can focus on is colour contrast. You can also use things like the Hemingway App to check reading age.

Another thing you can look at is keyboard accessibility. Check the tab order. Be aware of screen readers, which some of your users may need to use. But above all, be consistent across all of your products.

When using third party products and libraries, choose those that have already done the hard work for you where accessibility is concerned. When making colour choices, don’t rely on colour alone to convey meaning. You can also use shape, texture, and position.

Whenever there is an audio component, don’t assume that people will be able to hear. Provide transcripts as well. With all your accessibility requirements, start with the guidelines and then speak to your users.

That’s the end of Jonathan’s segment but don’t go yet, stick around for extra content.

Clare: Every other episode, this last short segment will be devoted to story time. Storytelling is useful for teaching, for unlocking empathy, and for creating a sense of shared connection and trust in your teams. I love telling stories to both children and adults. I’m actually a lapsed member of the UK Society for Storytelling. So, the plan is that I’m going to be using stories to illustrate various points about effective software development.

This story time is a little unusual, so I think it deserves a bit of extra explanation. This was originally recorded for our Women in Engineering Day episode. We ended up not having room for it. It’s all about what it feels like to be a woman working in an all-male environment, and how much we can end up changing to fit in.
Today our story comes from Ludivine Siau, who looks after Service Delivery Operations in Made Tech’s London Market. Hello Lu.

Lu: Hi Clare.

Clare: After college in your first job, you were in an all-male environment, is that correct?

Lu: Yes. My first job as a software engineer in London was with a team of ten male colleagues, some from the US, some from the UK. The first day I joined, I learned immediately that the social they were having every week was going to a strip club in Soho.

Clare: Okay. How did you handle that? How did you react to that?

Lu: I don’t think I was shocked, for some reason. I tried to tag along or to ask to tag along, but they dropped their social pretty quickly when I arrived.

Clare: But you felt as though you should tag along. Did you want to? Did you have any particular desire to go to a strip club or was it just because you wanted to fit in?

Lu: I think I was curious in some part; I can’t deny that. I still haven’t been, so I’m still curious as to how greasy that is. Also, yes, I wanted to be there when they were having fun. I wanted to laugh along and go on a night out with my colleagues and bond and get to know them. So, for sure, it was just a desire to not be left aside.

Clare: Yes. How do you feel about that, about the idea of having to go to a strip club in order to fit in with your colleagues?

Lu: I’m pretty sure that would be very awkward and very uncomfortable now. I wouldn’t even ask about it, I would completely distance the idea.

Clare: Yes. Okay, so we’ve talked about the fact that you have probably changed to fit in with a male environment. How do you feel about women that don’t change at all, and don’t try to fit in?

Lu: I’m not sure what that looks like, actually. I still don’t quite understand how much that changed me, and how much that was just me genuinely getting along with the boys because of my inherent character. Maybe I was boyish to start with. But I have no doubt that I have sometimes some biases against girlish women, which is a bad word already, saying ‘girlish’ and ‘boyish’, what does that mean any more, you know?

Clare: Yes.

Lu: It’s really strange. I try to catch myself when that happens.

Clare: I know that something that I have experienced – and even saying it feels ridiculous – but I have walked into a room for a meeting, and the room has contained people that I don’t know. One of the people in the room is not just female, but stereotypically female: wearing makeup maybe, or heels. I have assumed that woman was there in an administrative role, that she wasn’t technical staff. What I’ve realised is that I have an idea that – I’m used to seeing women in technical roles, but I assume that they look and behave a certain way. If they look stereotypically feminine, then I assume they are not technical. Have you ever felt like that?

Lu: Yes, I completely know what you are saying. Maybe that’s one way I changed myself when I was in engineering school, is de-feminising myself.

Clare: There’s some really interesting stuff about this is a book called Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine, which is a fantastic book, I highly recommend it. She talks about when women work in male dominated environments, they will change their behaviour to fit in. They will become more stereotypically masculine and less stereotypically feminine. They don’t even know that they are doing it because it is a natural thing that human beings do. We will change to fit the group that we are in.

Because this is a male-dominated industry, obviously it’s going to be common that the women that work in it do that. Then that creates a new stereotype in our head that when we see stereotypically female women, we assume that they are not technical.

Lu: That’s interesting, that it’s a self-feeding circle, yes.

Clare: Yes. This was really interesting, thank you so much for talking to me.

Lu: Thank you, Clare.

[Music sting]

Jack: Hi, I’m Jack, Made Tech’s Event Coordinator. Working in the public sector means that at Made Tech, we really care about making a difference. For this final Making Life Better segment, myself and my colleagues will be sharing small pieces of advice to make the world a better place.

Today’s advice comes from me on helping people who are struggling. Don’t aim to solve a person’s problem. Ask instead what they need from you. When someone is struggling with their work or their life or anything in between, they are often not looking to others for a solution. If someone is sharing their feelings with you, they are not necessarily asking you to fix their problems. Very often, you won’t be able to. However, reminding that person that you are willing to help in any way at your disposal, is incredibly reassuring. This can be done as easily as asking, ‘What is there that I can do to make this problem easier on you?’.
I have found that this will at the very least serve as a reminder that they are not facing their problems alone, that they have you, someone that is willing to put in the effort, in their corner, making it a problem shared, which is a problem halved.
That’s all from me, have a good week.

[Music Sting]

Clare: And that’s the end of another episode. If you are enjoying the podcast, please do leave us ratings and reviews because it pushes us up the directories and makes it easier for other people to find us.

Speaking of which, thank you to two more reviewers on the Apple platform. Scott Edwards – who finds the podcast particularly relevant for public sector work – and Mushroom Cat, who likes to listen every morning before stand-up, and particularly enjoyed the Dave Rogers episode.

I’ve got a few talks coming up. You can see the details on my events page on Medium, which is linked to from my Twitter profile. You can find that at @claresudbery, which is probably not spelled the way that you think. There is no ‘I’ in Clare, and ‘Sudbery’ is spelt E R Y at the end, the same as surgery or carvery.
You can find Made Tech on Twitter @madetech, M A D E T E C H.

Do come and say hello, we are very interested to hear your feedback and any suggestions you have for any content for future episodes, or just come and have a chat.

Thank you to Rose (our editor), Gina Cady (our virtual assistant), Viv Andrews (our transcriber), Richard Murray for the music (there’s a link in the description), and to the rest of our internal Made Tech team: Kyle Chapman, Jack Harrison, Karsyn Robb and Laura Plaga. Also in the description is a link for subscribing to our newsletter. We publish new episodes every fortnight on Tuesday mornings. Thank you for listening and goodbye.

[Recording Ends]

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