Accessibility Down Under

Will Butler:

You're listening to 13 Letters, the accessibility podcast from Be My Eyes. I'm your cohost, Will Butler, and this week we're taking you to the land down under to get a sneak peek at the thriving and vibrant accessibility scene in Australia. And who better to do that than with the inimitable team from Intopia, that's the group that practices digital accessibility down in Australia and seems to pop up at all sorts of conferences and events throughout the year.

Will Butler:

We landed our interview this week with Intopia co-founder Sarah Pulis and the guy she calls accessibility royalty, Andrew Arch. As we jump into the call you hear me and my cohost, Cordelia McGee-Tubb, talking a little bit about our frustrations with a particular podcasting service.

Will Butler:

Looks like it's rolling, can everyone still hear everyone, Will here.

Sarah Pulis:

Sarah here.

Andrew Arch:

Andrew here.

Sarah Pulis:

Hi everyone.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Okay, wow. This is-

Will Butler:

Andrew and Sarah can you hear Cordelia?

Sarah Pulis:

Yes.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

This is real life. Okay.

Andrew Arch:

Yes I can hear Will, Cordelia and Sarah. Cordelia, can you hear me?

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Yes I can.

Andrew Arch:

Okay good, I thought maybe we were talking over each other then for a moment.

Will Butler:

This is like an ad for Zoom basically.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

We should include this at the start.

Sarah Pulis:

Yes, take one, take two, take three.

Will Butler:

On the fifth relaunch of Zencastr we finally got it figured out. The contrast is low, the buttons aren't labeled.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Yeah, the buttons are not labeled. We have a lot of accessibility feedback for our friends at Zencastr.

Will Butler:

Can I just start us off, let's dive in because Cordelia and I have been avoiding ranting about Zencastr for some time now and I don't want to rant about them because they probably are really nice folks. But Zencastr is not accessibility, can we just start there.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

I believe it, I have facts to confirm this.

Will Butler:

Cordelia ran a little screen reader test before Andrew and Sarah joined us, what'd you find Cordelia?

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

I found that while some of the buttons are labeled, it's like the stateful button, the mute button is labeled mute, unmute, but it doesn't actually tell you what state it's in. And then the settings button also is not accessibility via keyboard.

Will Butler:

And there's a whole number of other elements that are kind of confusing and I mean it's not so far off, but it's not really workable. Someone with a screen reader who had no vision wouldn't be able to get it working or without a lot of trouble.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

But I feel like it has potential. I think that it actually would be some pretty straight forward changes to make this product more accessible.

Will Butler:

Andrew, Sarah, if you're taking the first meeting with Zencastr, let's just take them as a fun example, a company is at this stage where they're relatively new and they pushed a product out and because of a series of world events have a lot of people using it, where is their relationship with accessibility like?

Andrew Arch:

Yes, so this is the first time that I've seen the product and just as a sighted user moving around on there, there's a lot of little things that I think somebody with contrast issues would have trouble with. I just tried to mute myself while you were talking about the fact that some of the buttons aren't labeled, and once I muted myself it was very difficult even for me to see the white on the pale blue, I think we've got contrast issues around things like that. As well the settings logo up in the top right is also going to look to me [inaudible 00:04:01] very very low contrast.

Sarah Pulis:

I think though for a company like Zencastr, it's a huge opportunity to be accessible. As Cordelia said, it doesn't sound like it's actually going to be a huge amount of work to do so, the interface is not terribly complex. At the moment when so many people are having to move online, we have examples like Zoom where they made themselves into the product that people know really values accessibility and has put a lot of work behind it and that does result in greater market share. If I was asked, hey, what's a video conferencing platform that you know is pretty accessible and tends to work for most people? Immediately I would say Zoom. So I think it's a huge advantage for Zencastr to start to address this early on and really put themselves out there if they do.

Will Butler:

Well now that we've already got a free professional consultation from Intopia, Cordelia, maybe you should introduce these two wonderful people since you've known them for some time now.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Yeah, I'm super excited to introduce Sarah and Andrew from Intopia digital. They're based in Australia and I got to meet them when they invited me to come speak at A11y Camp many years ago and it's been so cool to get to know them and to kind of start to understand the accessibility scene in Australia and I'm super, super delighted that they're joining us today. So thanks for being here.

Will Butler:

Welcome, welcome guys.

Sarah Pulis:

Thanks so much.

Andrew Arch:

Glad to be here. Seems as though we've known you, Cordelia, for many more than the three years that you suggested, that was when you spoke at A11y Camp.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Maybe it's been decades, I don't know. Time is meaningless at this point.

Will Butler:

What parts of Australia are you both in?

Sarah Pulis:

I'm in Sydney.

Andrew Arch:

And I live just outside Melbourne in a small town, rather than living in the metropolis.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

So I was talking with Stewart from Intopia-

Andrew Arch:

Yay.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

... And talking with him about how we really wanted to get some folks from your company to be on this podcast, and he referred to you two as a great dynamic duo around topics like WCAG, design, usability, all this great stuff. And so I was like, whoa, we can't not have the dynamic duo together. You're our first pair of interview participants, so thanks for being our first.

Sarah Pulis:

No problems. Andrew and I probably are building a bit of a reputation. We do do a lot of presentations together and workshops together, and we preplan very little. So we tend to, if we're in the same room we can just give each other a look, it's about a three second look and we know that's the hey, I'm passing the baton to you. And usually no one knows that we haven't actually rehearsed and said, this section's yours and this section's mine.

Will Butler:

Sarah you have this long resume that I'm looking at, director, confounder at Intopia, and all this experience. How is it that you think of what do you do? How do you think of it and how does Andrew play into that?

Sarah Pulis:

Ultimately despite all the various titles you just rattled off, for me I'm an accessibility practitioner. That is the core of who I am and what I do. It's very lucky that I guess that I've had the ability to set up Intopia with Stewart and Adam. So we're the three cofounders of Intopia. With Andrew, so I'll embarrass him because he knows what's coming, I call Andrew Australia accessibility royalty. And I have to say I was-

Andrew Arch:

I'm cringing.

Sarah Pulis:

... Yes, I know you are. I was in awe of Andrew, he was like accessibility God to me for so long, and then he came to work for Intopia and he and I have never looked back in terms of working together and dreaming up what's the next interesting or exciting way that we can bring accessibility to the people that we work with.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

That's awesome.

Will Butler:

Andrew, now I have to ask you, how do you think about what you do and how does Sarah and her team enable that?

Andrew Arch:

Yeah, so I suppose I consider that I'm trying to make a difference in the world. I've had several careers, all of those have been trying to make a difference to Australians primarily, but these days to the rest of the world as well. Working in accessibility for a couple of decades as I have been now is really just a continuation of me trying to make a difference. And more recently working with Intopia with the focus that it's had in the commercial sector, when I first joined them I felt as though we could make a much bigger difference to the Australia population and people with disability and impairments and around the usability requirements for those people than I could just working in the government sector. So Intopia's helped me broaden my focus again from the government sector, which is an essential sector, to the broader commercial, not-for-profit, plus the government sector; and making a wider difference.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Nice, and you mentioned you've had several different careers, so yeah I looked at your LinkedIn profile for the first time since I met you and I saw that you have a PhD in natural resource economics and land degradation. So Andrew, how did you journey from that focus into becoming what did Sarah call you, Australian accessibility royalty? What was that journey?

Sarah Pulis:

Andrew, when we're out of isolation you can hit me on the arm later.

Andrew Arch:

I've never been a person who has planned their career for the rest of their lives. I know a few people, I've had a few friends who have done that, but I've always been an opportunistic person. If there's an opportunity I will take it if it looks interesting. And that's helped keep life interesting as I've moved through a few careers. So, yes, the PhD, I was working in the field of soil conservation and agriculture at the time. My first degree was agricultural science and I was looking at the impacts of land degradation on farmers and farmer income. And on the relationship between what farmers were earning from their farms versus how they would treat the soils in particular, and that relationship there.

Andrew Arch:

I was in department of agriculture when the web first got underway back in the early 90s and was put in charge of a unit that was looking at common statistics for the whole department and we were on the same floor as the IT guys and they were saying, there's this interesting thing called the web, but what would anybody ever use it for. And I said, thank you very much, we'll take that and we'll run with it and we'll distribute standard statistics across the whole state so that the ministers could get the same advice from the east end of the state as he was getting from the west end of the state about the number of dairy farmers for instance, and we standardized on statistics.

Andrew Arch:

So that lead me into managing and developing an internet and then the website for the department of agriculture, and at that point with dial up 300 board modems, we had very low connection, don't know whether any of you were around when we had 300 board modems, but we were advising farmers that they could press the tab key to move around on a screen from link to link, and then press the enter key to follow a link. And we were advising them to turn their images off and they required alt text if they turned the images off, and just to turn them on again. That allowed them to do things much more quickly. At those stages we had very little interactivity other than information on the web, but it made it much more efficient for them to be able to turn images off and rely on the alt text and to tab around their screens.

Andrew Arch:

Farmers also often had poor hand eye coordination. I think back to my father in law who could take a tractor apart and put it back together, but moving a mouse around that he was using with his hand in one and then watching on the screen and trying to move that mouse, it just went all over the place. So that sort of got me interested in alternative ways of using the web, and then I moved to the department of health and they were building the better health channel and they wanted accessibility and that's when the web content accessibility guidelines were first being [inaudible 00:13:11] and came out, and it's been a very exciting ride since then. Here I am with Intopia these days.

Will Butler:

So, I don't think people realize that low bandwidth internet users have many of the same needs as those with disabilities. Am I correct in assuming that a big part of the world is accessing the internet through a slower connection, or low bandwidth connection.

Andrew Arch:

I think that's true, and if you look at the African continent with skipping the wired distribution and moving straight to mobile, I think that's probably very true in that continent. In these days in developed countries we just tend to assume that everybody's got at least ADSL2 and reasonable connectivity, but I can remember even when only a decade ago when traveling and you were trying to connect in a hotel, I would turn the images off just to get a better reception in hotel rooms.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Yeah, and I think it's not just better reception, but it's also a lot of people are using older devices and that's where things like color contrast and zoom and all theses different visual aspects come into play, because a lot of designers are designing on retina screens, but most of their users aren't on technology that's that sophisticated.

Andrew Arch:

I think that's true with the older population, probably less true now than it was say five years ago, but I know in my friends and family it was when we upgraded our computers they went to the grandparents so that they were running on older equipment as well, which had lower resolution, less contrast, and so on.

Will Butler:

Sarah your resume is not quite as long as Andrew's but there's some impressive names on there. You were doing accessibility for Media Access, media and looks like Price Waterhouse Cooper's Australia, what was your journey like into accessibility, even if it was more recent?

Sarah Pulis:

So I first I think came to accessibility back in about 2002. I started my Masters of research which wasn't actually in accessibility, it was in metadata and meta modeling, but my research supervisor, Lidy Nevil, is one of those other Australia accessibility pioneers and she was sort of also actively working on accessibility in Australia very early on and she was the one that introduced me to accessibility. And I kept an active interest while I was doing my research, and then I sort of fell into a marketing and communications role for a little while at the university that I was at. But it was about 10 years ago this year that I was offered a role at Media Access Australia and moved into accessibility full-time and I haven't looked back.

Sarah Pulis:

Went through figures at Media Access Australia, very briefly at Stamford Interactive before they were acquired by PWC. Spend two years at PWC before then starting Intopia, which was about four years ago now.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

You mentioned that you were doing this research degree in metadata and that seems super relevant to accessibility when you think about all of the, especially in web accessibility, all of the ARIA attributes that provide this metadata about what a component actually is. It actually makes a lot of sense to me how you ended up in accessibility.

Sarah Pulis:

Yeah, I think I definitely, funny enough, in my role now do draw on a lot of my background of sort of having done a technical degree allows me to be, to sort of understand the technical side of accessibility. Obviously the metadata side of things, as you say, sort of links in with some of those, how we apply attributes and that kind of thing. And then the marketing and communications side, it's all about how do we connect and communicate accessibility to all the different people that we interact with. And I guess we're lucky at Intopia where we have such a diverse range of work that we do, that one day I might be talking to a senior executive and they've got particular things that they need to know around accessibility, the different influences you might use for say a senior manager, bringing them along, or senior executive, bringing them along to understand why accessibility is important. And then the next day I'm working at [inaudible 00:17:50] with the designers and the developers, and that's different communication style again. So I do think all the sort of different strings have come together in what I do today.

Will Butler:

How do the three cofounders split the work and what's your role amongst all the team at Intopia? What do you specialize in?

Sarah Pulis:

Of three cofounders, Adam and I are accessibility specialists. Stewart actually is our managing director. Gosh he can hold his own in a talk around accessibility these days, but unlike Adam and I, he didn't come from that accessibility background, but definitely from more the technical GIS background. So he sort of does, as I say, I don't want to be doing the finances or anything like that, so Stewart looks after a lot of the... Well he does a lot of the business development, account management, finance. We are still at that size, although we've actually grown quite quickly for an accessibility consultancy, we are still at that size where we do wear a lot of hats still in what we do.

Sarah Pulis:

And from my point of view, I mean I still probably do specialize in working with organizations on accessibility. You can pretty much send me in and I've got a fair breadth of experience I guess in accessibility, so you can pretty much send me in wherever you need, whenever you need, and I'll be able to help out. So that's kind of where I sit on that side.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

And what... So you all started Intopia in 2015, what kind of led you to want to start your own accessibility agency? What was the motivation there and what did you want to do differently I guess than other firms?

Sarah Pulis:

As the story goes, Adam had been talking to me for two years before we officially started Intopia about doing that. And he patiently waited for me for two years to actually be ready. But during that he and I were both working in, well I was working at PWC at the time, he was working for one of our major banks [inaudible 00:20:10] and also had his own consultancy on the side, but just as he himself doing a little bit. And we sort of both had the experience where we felt that there was probably a better way to do accessibility, and that came down to a few things.

Sarah Pulis:

First of all, at the time in Australia there was a lot of thou must do accessibility. You are bad people if you don't, let me bang the table and tell you, you should not be launching your website unless it's 100% accessible. And we kind of thought that you don't really bees with vinegar, you catch them with honey. So we wanted to I guess bring a much more open and inclusive approach to accessibility and a much more collaborative approach to accessibility. We also felt that we'd been in situations where for instance, an organization might've got an audit report from one of the existing consultancies and then we were playing the intermediary to parse what that report said for that particular organization we were working with.

Sarah Pulis:

So we also felt that in terms of how you deliver information around accessibility, whether it be something like that like an audit report, could be improved by really focusing on who it was we were talking to and that clarity of information. And so there were sort of these things that we were tossing around and as I said, Adam's like, "I really want to do this." And so we sat down and decided to start Intopia. As I said, I was probably the hold up, and we definitely haven't looked back.

Andrew Arch:

When I was leaving government again, I've been in and out of government several times in my lifetime. It was that pragmatic approach that attracted me particularly to Intopia. I've always felt that taking half a step is better than taking no steps in terms of moving forward with accessibility. Now Intopia was taking that very pragmatic approach where we'll help you where we can, we don't expect you do to everything overnight. Every little bit is going to help somebody, so that's a great way of the way Intopia works.

Will Butler:

Sarah alluded to the culture around accessibility in Australia and I wonder if we could dig into that a little bit because to many of us who haven't been to Australia, we don't have any sense of what it's like. How similar or different it might be from the United States or other parts of the western world. What is the culture of accessibility down there?

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Down under.

Will Butler:

Yeah, Andrew, maybe you could kick it off.

Andrew Arch:

Yeah, it's very much not a litigious approach. We did have back in 2000, during the Olympic games, a milestone court case where the Sydney games, Olympic games organizing committee was taken to court by a blind screen reader user because initially you couldn't buy tickets, and then was having trouble accessing the results. And I know after that court case found in his favor, a lot of countries around the world said, hey, look, we'd love to have a court case like that because it actually sets the scene and makes it very apparent that accessibility online, digital accessibility falls under the law. Our national disability discrimination act is 1992, which is effectively pre web, it was only if you were working at a scientific organization that you'd have known about the internet and the web at that stage. And hasn't been updated other than having some notes written that have evolved over the years to make it quite clear as a result of that case and bricks and mortar accessibility is one thing, but digital accessibility also falls under that.

Andrew Arch:

So we've had very few court cases. We've had a couple in some recent years but none of them have resulted in trials, going actually through the courts. They've always been settled out of court beforehand. So we don't have that, it's the law, you must do it, apart from a few people who were thumping the table in days gone by that Sarah alluded to. But here it's very much organizations saying, this looks as though it's going to be good for business, there's a group of people out there that we could attract, and [inaudible 00:24:46] have done that quite well and anecdotally if you attract customers and you treat them well, they stay with you. And that's the same for people with disability.

Will Butler:

Do you think Australian product and services are more accessible than other places or are you behind, Sarah?

Sarah Pulis:

I think that's a hard one because there is still so much variation in accessibility. What I will say though is that I believe that the lack of the litigious driver that Andrew has mentioned, has resulted in accessibility being... Seen less as a compliance check box exercise and more about focusing on the user. So certainly 10 years ago I was still hearing about accessibility equals WCAG, and we still have some organizations that do take that approach. But I have also seen, in the last five years in particular, where organizations are understanding that accessibility is just a part of good user experience and we're building in more usability testing into what we do. And I guess having organizations be less worried about, I have got 100% of all those WCAG requirements met, to let's actually look at the experience for the user.

Sarah Pulis:

And I think that has ultimately meant that I'm not really sure whether I would say Australia is better or worse than any other country in terms of how accessible its products are, but I do think that in terms of how we see accessibility and that focus on the user probably is core. And we're not being driven by fear, this is not a organizations are fearful and therefore doing accessibility and looking for the absolutely minimum that they can do to cover their asses, let's say. They really are looking at it as how do we make this business as usual.

Sarah Pulis:

We've got quite a few organizations in the last sort of year or so that are actually, we're working more at that strategic level. These are quite large corporates and they're looking at where are out gaps, how do we make this into something that we just do and what are all the supports that we need to put in place to make sure that happens.

Andrew Arch:

I think the way when we do do an audit for an organization, we rank the difficulties that we've come across or the failures that we've come across, in terms of this will be a show stopper. Somebody with a particular disability or a particular type of assisted technology won't be able to proceed beyond here. This will be a minor inconvenience for them, even though it might be a technical WCAG failure, so we're trying to encourage them to look at it from the user perspective rather than from the compliance perspective.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Yeah, that's fantastic, and it's interesting with the WCAG success criteria, I found that people can... A website can follow WCAG exactly to the letter and they can create a website that perfectly passes every automated accessibility tester, tests that you can find, but it's not actually that usable. And I love that you all are stressing the importance of usability. So how do people learn about usability and accessibility if they're new to it. I feel like if I were to just read WCAG for instance, I might not know what path to go down to make a product that really, really works well for everyone, and a product that people really want to use. How do UX folks find out how to make usable products for everyone, for people of all the different ability levels?

Sarah Pulis:

So I think you're right Cordelia, we're sort of still shifting, I guess shifting the boat in terms of accessibility not being seen as WCAG. And if you're starting out and you're doing your own research, I do think you probably will fall down that rabbit hole in the first instance of accessibility is WCAG. I do think though there are certain resources out there that are definitely helping. The web accessibility initiatives website of which of course WCAG and other standards are part of that, but they do have quite a lot of material that is written where it's drawing on some of the WCAG success criteria and requirements, but are also talking about it in context of what you can do as a designer or a developer or a tester.

Sarah Pulis:

The other really powerful resource I think is the Microsoft inclusive design toolkit.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Oh, absolutely. I reference that a lot.

Sarah Pulis:

Absolutely. And I think ultimately for me when I'm working with organizations, that's where I kind of see the start and the end point. The start point is usually WCAG or even before that, even just awareness of what accessibility is. And that end point for me is a true inclusive design process. And it's then how do you edge people, sort of up that [inaudible 00:30:17]. So you might start by looking at awareness, so funnily enough when you point out to most UX's that accessibility is really just good user experience and particularly if they can observe a few users using a product, particularly if there are barriers, usually that's a big ah-ha moment for them and they really come to the table because they've already chosen their profession in terms of user experience and focusing on the users.

Sarah Pulis:

And often it's just, unfortunately it's not in our course curriculum, wherever they've learnt UX, whether it's been at university or otherwise, often it's not mentioned. So once you get them started, and to be honest for me it's been the same with like devs, that kind of thing. Once you get them started and hopefully lay that good foundation for what is a truly accessible experience, then they can take off from there.

Andrew Arch:

Yes, I'll have to concur with that. Some of the best successes in convincing teams that accessibility is something that makes a difference to people is bringing one or two or three different people, people with different disabilities in and different technologies in and demonstrating the product that the dev team might've built, or the design team have designed and built. And seeing how people who don't have 20/20 vision, perfect contrast, perfect hearing, perfect hand eye coordination and dexterity might use their product, that is the ah-ha moment and they're convinced. My experience has been that most people don't know very many people with disability. They might know their grandparents who might be hard of hearing and losing some sight and have a bit of movement difficulty, but actually seeing somebody using their own product in a different way can make the world of difference to how they then approach the world.

Will Butler:

I saw a talk from you guys some amount of time back about cognitive walk throughs. Could you tell us a little bit about what that approach is and what the idea is behind it, because I think it sort of fits in with what we're talking about here.

Sarah Pulis:

Sure, so cognitive walk throughs actually is a user experience technique. So it's not actually anything new and in essence it's choosing a persona and then walking through a task with that persona in mind. When you do it outside of accessibility it's more, sometimes it might be choosing a persona, they might have particular requirements, they might have particular backgrounds. We sort of adapted this to use it in accessibilities where you can choose a persona with different access requirements and we tend to use either the gov.uk personas, which are freely available, or the ones from a web for everyone, from the book.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

We got to interview Whitney Quesenbery who co-wrote a web for everyone early on the podcast and talked with her a little bit about these personas. So just wanted to plug that book again, it's a really useful resource. Keep going Sarah.

Sarah Pulis:

Absolutely. Yeah, no, absolutely. So yeah, so you sort of pick up the persona, you've mapped out what your key tasks are and what the steps in that task would be and then you can actually walk through the task with that user in mind. And this technique was actually inspired by, I was doing an audit for a client and I sort of was looking at their website for keyboard accessibility and everything worked perfectly with a keyboard. You could use the keyboard no issue. But I started to have a look at this and there was sort of, one of the key things you login. So you login to the site and then you can start adding things to your cart. And I realized that because of the sort of order in which the items were laid out on the screen and the tab order, it took about 80 odd tabs to get to this core login button.

Sarah Pulis:

And at the time I did actually raise this as an issue, it wasn't anything I could fail against WCAG, but I said, hey, I think this might be an issue for anyone who just uses the keyboard and doesn't use any other sort of plugins to skip around the interface. And the organization was like, yep, absolutely, and they did put a fix in. But at that stage it was really too late to completely redevelop the website and to implement a new keyboard tabbing order. And that's what actually got me thinking about using the cognitive walk through technique which I had known from working with the UX team Stamford and PWC. And how that cognitive walk through could have been used in the situation where if we had of actually sat down with a persona that was a keyboard user and mapped out the flow of what I needed to do in order to login and then start adding things to cart, we would've realized that 80 plus tabs wasn't the way to go and that all we really needed to do was sort of reorder our tabbing order and you could've done that. That could've been done at the design stage. And so that's sort of where it came from.

Andrew Arch:

I had a similar ah-ha moment years ago when I was working at Vision Australia and we were doing some testing for an international bank, I can't even recall what bank it was now. And they had multiple levels of fly out menus and if you were interested in a home loan it was something like a 121 tabs of the keyboard to get to the information about home loans because there were five levels of fly out-

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Wow.

Andrew Arch:

... And 17 horizontal tabs to fly out through as you went down each one. So the idea of doing those walk throughs early on became really apparent to me at that stage, and when Sarah and I started working together and talking about the different ways that we do things, taking that user experience approach and saying, okay, you can do this at lots of different stages, it's not just an end testing tool, it's something that you can think about much earlier in the design or even the requirements stage of helping people to get to the right place where they're going to be able to do business with you. And then working through the UX approach and saying okay, how can we formalize this a bit more with the personas and so on for an accessibility walk through.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Yeah, and I think that example of a million tab stops to get to the thing you want to interact with, I think is that perfect example of it's accessible but not really usable. So I love the idea of the technique of using cognitive walk throughs to really think about what is the optimal user flow for this and how can we make sure that every user, regardless of how they're interacting with this, gets that simple, straight forward experience. That's great. I need to start using that approach in my own user story creation, so I learned a lot from that talk that you all did.

Andrew Arch:

Thanks.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

And I wanted to chat too about personas, because I know one thing that a lot of organizations struggle with when they're starting to realize that accessibility is important because a lot of organizations aren't there yet, but they have that ah-ha moment of, accessibility is important and we want to do more user research. But a lot of organizations just don't know where to start, they don't know how to find users, what to ask them. What advice would you give to these organizations who are just starting out on their journey?

Andrew Arch:

I think picking up on what Sarah was saying about taking that existing personas, I mean a lot of organizations have personas that represent... If you're a retail organization you might have the single young person, you might have the family, you might have the older couple, you might have the retired couple and so on, and what purchasing experiences are they bringing to your organization, how can you appeal to them in different ways. And taking those personas in the first instance and applying one or two different disabilities to them, you could say, okay, the young person... Okay, so let's assume that they have a physical disability and they don't have the dexterity that the average 21 year old might have, how can we look at their experience on top of what we've designed as their persona and their purchasing habits and their requirements for our particular retail business. That's a good way of starting.

Andrew Arch:

As we said, that then allows you to apply that cognitive walk through. But then you need to move on and say okay, we've made lots of assumptions, they may or may not be true, we've applied our own biases and our own understandings to that, it's time that we actually got some real people to come and look at that. And start thinking about how we might do usability if they're already doing some usability, bring in some people with disabilities if they haven't already as part of their user research and usability testing of the product from right back when they're thinking about a new product or redesigning an existing product, through to the delivery.

Andrew Arch:

Sarah do you want to pick up on that?

Sarah Pulis:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think in that-

Andrew Arch:

I can't give you a wink or a look in your direction here, I've got to be vocal about it.

Sarah Pulis:

I know, actually I was thinking I would just type in the chat and direct you when we needed to pass the baton. Yeah, and I think to that point of how you get to that next step of doing more user research and usability testing with people with disabilities, again in that practical, pragmatic way it's start somewhere and start small. So we've worked with organizations where they might just start by getting just one or two users in to do that usability testing with and although it's going to give you great insights into the experience of those one or two users, also using that as a tool to show the importance of doing usability testing with people with disabilities as we talked about before, there's nothing like seeing a user struggle to use your product. And I've definitely had experiences where we do this with organizations and you've got the design, the dev team there and they're saying, oh my gosh, I was just cringing in the background looking at this user trying to do something and not being able to do it.

Sarah Pulis:

And that could be really impactful, doing that with the team that's in the room, taking a recording with consent and then putting that together as something that you can circulate in the organization. And that often can be the first sort of step of getting that, I guess getting that buy in and showing the importance of doing that.

Sarah Pulis:

The other one that we find works well with organizations is the next step is using your countries disability statistics. So in Australia one in five people identify as having a disability when they filled in the last census. So it's pretty hard to argue if you're doing your regular usability testing and you, let's say, do do testing with five users at a time, well one should have some form of disability. That's not going to give you full coverage, but again, that can be your next step in sort of building up momentum. And then it might be, well then we do need to have enough users to really know the experience, one user is still one user, and you can build from there.

Andrew Arch:

On top of that, the other thing that we emphasize and become apparent after a while once people start bringing in people with disabilities is that they're picking up the same usability issues that they were before, but sometimes they're highlighted. People with disabilities have the same usability issues, sometimes they have additional ones obviously because of their disability or their assistive technology or their adaptive strategy, but a lot of the same usability issues go across the whole population and what we can often find is that they're emphasized a bit more for some people with disabilities than they might be for the people that they've been talking to in the past.

Andrew Arch:

So what might be a minor, small bump in the road becomes a major hurdle for somebody with a particular disability to get past and get over. Doesn't mean they can't do it, but it becomes much more obvious when you're doing usability testing often with people with disabilities than it might've been less obvious, but not even maybe mentioned by some of your other people that you're doing the usability testing with. So that's another point that we can emphasize as one of the advantages of some of the... General usability issues can be highlighted by people with disabilities.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Yeah, and Sarah mentioned, referencing your government's disability statistics, so Andrew I know that when you were working with the government you actually contributed quite a bit to the accessibility and inclusivity section of the gov.au content guide. Do you find yourself referencing that older work when you're in your current role at Intopia?

Andrew Arch:

Absolutely. I mean I think it's an area that often gets overlooked from an accessibility and usability point of view. We tend to look at the design, we tend to look at the technical sides of it, we often don't look at the content and the understandability of the content, the clarity of the content. Can somebody who's actually... Are we getting the clear messages across. So even working with private sector organizations, that content guide that we put together in government some years ago now is still a very good reference. That along with Sarah Richards content London readability guide, which is drawing on research based recommendations in terms of how you write content, how you write micro content.

Andrew Arch:

At the moment we're also are doing some more work with the digital transformation agency, the commonwealth government in Australia a few years ago finally decided to update the governments style manual, which is about how people write and publish information and we're now working with them to make sure that accessibility is being taken into account in rewriting and updating that publication. So that will have a bigger, broader impact as well because that publication is used by a lot of people in the editing field, professional editors and people like that as well. So I think really that we're starting to see that shift to the broader usability. It's not just the design, it's also the content and so often content it just doesn't get considered when organizations are talking about the accessibility and can people use their websites and transact with them.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Yeah, that's awesome. I have a particular soft spot for government style guides and content guides, so I love reading like the Australia one, the gov.uk one is just really describing these concepts in plain language and sharing such helpful guidance that I think starts as internal guidelines for the government but then anyone can go and apply this to their own work. So I'm definitely consulting these resources a lot.

Will Butler:

Naive question, what is micro content refer to?

Andrew Arch:

Little bits of content like the label you might put on a form.

Will Butler:

Got it.

Andrew Arch:

The tips that you might have in terms of how you're going to fill in a form.

Will Butler:

How a button is labeled.

Andrew Arch:

It's not sentences and paragraphs, the micro content is that very small bit of content that is crucial to somebody being able to understand and transact with you.

Will Butler:

Like when I right click on an element in Google Drive and I'm quickly working, I'm legally blind so I use magnification, I'm constantly accidentally clicking remove when I want to click rename. Because to my blurry vision they are too similar.

Sarah Pulis:

Right.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Those are very separate actions. Yeah. You do not want to get those [crosstalk 00:47:34].

Will Butler:

And if I'm renaming something it means it's very important.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

It's true.

Andrew Arch:

Yeah.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Renaming it to deleted.

Sarah Pulis:

Yeah, outside of changing the text label Will, what else would help you distinguish between those two options?

Will Butler:

Well they are not next to each other which is a good start. I honestly think it's a micro content issue, right. That's why I brought it up, is because they look similar. They're similar shape words.

Andrew Arch:

Similar [crosstalk 00:48:03].

Will Butler:

They begin with a capital R and they end with E.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

So even if it were delete for instance, that might be better because-

Will Butler:

Definitely.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

... Same kind of length of word but different shape.

Andrew Arch:

Quite a different shape, yes.

Will Butler:

[crosstalk 00:48:18] something, yeah.

Sarah Pulis:

Wonder whether someone with dyslexia might also have a similar problem because the words look quite similar.

Andrew Arch:

Or anybody in the world.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

In Google, in Gmail at least, my favorite, I think my favorite feature in Gmail is that they have an option for you to switch from either having text labels for buttons, or icon labels for buttons. And I think that's a really beautiful example of an accessibility preference where it's accessibility regardless, right. The button if it's an icon it has alternative text, but they're kind of acknowledging that come people read text better than images and some people read images better than text. So giving the user the option to pick which one they want to see as their default button style I think is really cool and I wish more UIs did that.

Sarah Pulis:

I think that's where when we look at, I won't say the future in accessibility because we should be able to do this better now, but that concept of personalization and personalizing the interface. I think we're only just starting to see some of that coming through, and I don't think it's been to do with the fact that we can't do it, I think it's just more to do with we haven't thought about it from that point of view. And I think it can be quite powerful to think about that and also when I talk accessibility I like talking about needs and preferences and focusing on the fact that needs and preferences, everyone has a need or a preference. And it can be to do with how you're feeling on the day, or what device you're using, or what's your particular preference. And I think that links quite well to that personalization concept.

Will Butler:

I wonder what places personalization is manifesting right now, because I know that... I can only speak for the blink community, but we're very paranoid about being given a separate lane, being given a separate experience with technology that recognizes you using a screen reader and puts you in a separate but equal channel, but personalization is very different, right.

Sarah Pulis:

That's right, yes. For me personalization is not about me guessing what you need, it's more me giving you the options to turn them on and off as you would like to at any point in time.

Will Butler:

I guess we're seeing it with dark mode on the iPhone and stuff like that.

Sarah Pulis:

Yes, we're definitely seeing I guess... We are seeing more personalization coming through and definitely I think in our mobile platforms there are definitely things where you can sort of turn things on or off, motion sensitivities, that kind of thing, those kind of settings can be turned on or off. I do think that there's probably opportunities for also people to look at their own applications, particularly if you're in an authenticated environment, so somewhere where you can login and you might have a particular preference. Even something as simple as turn on captions for all videos, don't make me every time I go to a video on your website, don't make me press the captioning button every single time.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

That'd be great.

Sarah Pulis:

Yeah. It's a small example but-

Will Butler:

Cordelia's like, yes please.

Sarah Pulis:

... I don't think it's terribly hard to do. But even to that level we're not really... We don't always see that happening. So I think there's a big thing there and funnily enough, and it links back to when I talked before about how I did my research in metadata and actually Andrew, funnily enough, it's a little bit unusual how much Andrew and I have done in the past when we didn't know each other. He's also got a metadata background. But funnily enough the concepts of personalization and also in their underlying form actually can be driven by metadata.

Will Butler:

How's that? I'm not as technical as you all, I'm trying to think about how that works.

Andrew Arch:

So the metadata might... The metadata on your device can record what your preferences are and then anytime you go to any different website or app or whatever it might be, it automatically knows that you want thins in reverse colors with slightly larger text and with icons replacing the text, like Cordelia described as the option in Gmail. That is metadata that's recorded about you in your personal preferences settings and every site that you go to will ping you or pole you to find out what your personal preferences are. And so they automatically do that switching, rather than you having to go and do that set up for every time and hope that it might record you through cookies or some other system.

Andrew Arch:

So it comes back to something that Gregg Vanderheiden and a whole group of other people were talking about and is still current but seems to have sort of gone of [inaudible 00:53:56] a bit lately, was the concept of GPII, global, somebody remind me what the acronym stands for. [inaudible 00:54:06] same thing, you go up to an ATM or a kiosk somewhere and you can actually interact with it through the mobile device that might be sitting on your wheelchair because you've come in proximity and you've triggered something that says, hey I want to do a check in at the airport. And all those personal preferences recorded in your profile metadata that says I want to interact in this way.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Andrew brought up the really great example of GPII, which I'd never heard of before. Global public inclusive infrastructure. Now I have an entire thing to spend my evening geeking out about, so this is exciting.

Andrew Arch:

Some amazing goals and ambitions in there. There's actually quite a bit of work going on in Europe at the moment as I understand it, much less than in the US which is sort of where it initiated.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

So the idea, correct me if I'm wrong here, so the idea is that you could go up to a kiosk of some kind and use your own device to interact with it. Is that like the basic idea?

Andrew Arch:

Yes.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Okay.

Andrew Arch:

And those preferences will go with you wherever you go and whatever you login to. So as soon as you've activated the device and it knows that it's me, Andrew, all my preferences that are stored on my local device, or maybe stored in their system, sorry, in my profile somewhere, I don't have to go and reset them every time I go somewhere new. The system reads my profile and my metadata about how I want to have something presented to me and automatically resets itself to that.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

That's fantastic. I work at a senior citizens center helping older adults use computers and they're in a computer lab where they're all sharing computers and how nice would it be if someone could just go up to one of these shared computers and just instantly have it respond to how they want to interact with it. Because one big issue they run into is that it may have been set up to be configured for the previous person who was using it and then they're kind of lost trying to figure out how to reset certain things. So it would be so nice if people could just kind of carry around their customizations and have that apply globally wherever they go. I love that idea.

Will Butler:

Oh my gosh, I have like four very specific settings, they're not complicated, that I have to do on my MAC OS computer in order to use it at all. They're a combination of inverted colors with a very specific, easily togglable key stroke, zoom, and selected text to speech with a key stroke. And it's like four things I have to do and if I don't have them I'm useless on a computer. And I realize that's also me not learning certain tech and aging, all these things, but if I could just plug a USB drive into a friends' computer or whatever, and initiate a preference switch.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

The Will Butler mode.

Will Butler:

Yeah, it would just be such a dream. And I could go into a recording studio and operate that computer, you know what I mean, wouldn't have to ever ask anyone for help getting it set up.

Sarah Pulis:

And the funny thing is that the GPII stuff, gosh Andrew, when did we hear about it, over 10 years ago I would say [inaudible 00:57:36].

Andrew Arch:

Oh, absolutely. 15 years ago or more.

Sarah Pulis:

Yeah.

Will Butler:

The thing that keeps hanging me up about it though is PII is used in GDPR and HIPAA to describe personally identifiable information that you're not supposed to share.

Andrew Arch:

Yep.

Will Butler:

And there might be a clash there. Like an acronym challenge, an acronym face off that might need to happen.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

A little PII versus GPII.

Will Butler:

Yeah, because it sounds like globally person, globally identifiable information, which it would scare the crap out of all the privacy [crosstalk 00:58:11].

Sarah Pulis:

I think some of the underlying metadata standards I think, is it still called access for all, Andrew?

Andrew Arch:

Yes, I think so.

Sarah Pulis:

I mean GPII I can't, I think at the time was what they badged this concept to be. I think the instances though we're seeing popping up of where some of the future thinking of GPII is being realized are not being called anything as such, they're just features that are being embedded into certain applications. The next level though is there are metadata standards like access for all, that have done quite a lot of work on how do you describe someone's profile. So what are all the different settings and in particular, making sure that their profile is just about what a person's needs and preferences are, it's got nothing to do with identifying your disability or that it's just I prefer to get my information in this way, see my screen in this way, and that kind of thing. So there's actually quite a lot of work already being done around some of these, I guess the building blocks that could actually make this a reality.

Andrew Arch:

And some of that's being done in the Dublin Core community as well.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

What is the Dublin Core community?

Andrew Arch:

Dublin Core is metadata, an international committee that works on metadata of all sorts, from banking to education. But with a number of people, Lidy Nevil that Sarah mentioned earlier, [inaudible 00:59:45] from Toronto and a lot of other people, accessibility has been taken up and being identified as a key part of the Dublin Core extension set to describe different preferences and describe different types of data.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

That's awesome.

Will Butler:

So, I'm not going to lie to you guys, you all know I'm not the technical one here, which is why you might not be surprised that I want to talk about bytes. And I thought it was food related, so maybe that's why I'm so eager to talk about this. But we can't let you guys go without talking about kind of the community that you've been building in Australia, and what is Accessibility Bytes? What are these... Does it involve food, please tell me it involves food?

Andrew Arch:

If it's Sarah or me it definitely involves food.

Sarah Pulis:

It normally involves food, but this year since we're having to go online, everyone has to bring their own food.

Will Butler:

Yeah, still involves food and I like it.

Sarah Pulis:

So I actually started A11y Bytes either years ago. A11y Bytes is run in celebration of global accessibility awareness day, which is coming up this month. So third Thursday in May each year, and this year it's the 21st of May. And it started because I wanted just Australia to do something around accessibility and global accessibility awareness day. And A11y Bytes came about because it's an evening of lightening talks, and that's where they bytes, the B-Y-T-E-S, comes from. So they're little bite sized presentations, but we're geeky here so we put the B-Y, not the B-I.

Sarah Pulis:

But I never realized that that was the start of A11y Bytes itself as an event, each year we had different states. So it started in Sydney, the next year it went to Melbourne, so we had A11y Bytes Sydney and Melbourne. They were in person events and they just really brought people together on a day to talk about both the lived experienced of people with disability when it comes to accessing technology, and also then sharing some tips and tricks on how to make things more accessible.

Sarah Pulis:

So that kicked off eight years ago and then a few years later we went, oh hey, we would love all these people, because it was... We had lots of people interested in coming to A11y Bytes and we've had success stories where someone came to A11y Bytes, a particular company savvy came to A11y Bytes, it was their first sort of introduction to accessibility and since then they've really taken it to heart and really embedded it into everything that they do, they build E-learning solutions.

Sarah Pulis:

So it really did exactly what global accessibility awareness day is all about. But we wanted then people to be able to come together in a, I guess, to hear in more detail about the different ways that we can hope to make digital experiences more accessible and that's where A11y Camp came along about three or four years after that. And so A11y Camp is part of the A11y Bytes brand and it's a conference where it sort of started off as a one day conference and as of last year it was a two day dual stream conference. We actually have a tech and a non-tech stream, and two days of workshops as well.

Sarah Pulis:

And I think that ethos that we have around Intopia actually came out of A11y Bytes. So a lot of the people who are now part of Intopia are actually along the way have been part of the A11y Bytes events as well and we wanted it to be welcoming and to build community so that people could come together and talk about things. Talk about how we can work to make a more inclusive world. So yeah, that's sort of where A11y Bytes came from and in some ways I guess Intopia fell out of it. They're definitely, they're two completely separate things, but I guess they do have that similar ethos.

Andrew Arch:

Is that why you invited me to speak at your first A11y Bytes event, so you could eventually [crosstalk 01:04:11].

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

It all makes sense.

Sarah Pulis:

I don't know that Intopia was even [inaudible 01:04:14] in my eye at that stage.

Will Butler:

Intopia's three years old now, or four years old?

Sarah Pulis:

Yeah, four earlier this year. So we're just over four.

Will Butler:

How do you guys measure your success?

Sarah Pulis:

I think we measure our success by the impact that we have. If we are doing good work, if we are helping organizations to become more accessible, and also through all the community activity that we do. Like Andrew at the moment is working with standards Australia to get some new international accessibility standards adopted here in Australia. If we can say that all those different things that we're doing are actually helping the move and create more accessible experiences in Australia and across the world, then we've done our job. And that's ultimately how I would like to measure what we're doing.

Will Butler:

That's great. Also, we'd be remiss if we didn't ask, where has your mind been going the past several weeks during all of this pandemic and the ensuing stay at home orders in regards to accessibility, Andrew?

Andrew Arch:

Yeah, so I think picking up just on what Sarah said, the opportunity to make a difference, a lasting difference that will carry on. The work that I've been doing with standards Australia which has just come to particular fruition in the last couple of weeks after chipping away at it for well over 12 months now and trying to get certain things passed there. They were receptive but just slow to react. Standards organizations always are slow to react, standards development is a long term process. But for instance we had the first meeting of the reconstitutors subcommittee yesterday which was a definite win to get an updated standard adopted in Australia or the European standard, EN301459, which is also written into the [inaudible 01:06:36] process if you're looking at international [inaudible 01:06:38].

Andrew Arch:

So in Australia now we will be adopting that, so from an accessibility point of view, making those little differences and just chipping away at them while you can't be out going down to the beach or going to the theater or whatever else you might light to do in your spare time. It is one of those things that gives you some satisfaction at the end of the day as well.

Will Butler:

Even with everything locked down and obviously certain businesses really suffering and maybe deprioritizing accessibility, you can still focus on some of these long term battles that we're fighting and get some big wins that are a little more of a process to achieve.

Andrew Arch:

Absolutely.

Will Butler:

What about you Sarah, what have you been thinking about?

Sarah Pulis:

Yeah, it's quite interesting, you mentioned, absolutely there are certain sectors that have been so significantly impacted by COVID-19. At the same time I do think it has brought even more attention though to the importance of accessibility for certain essential services.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Absolutely, yeah.

Sarah Pulis:

So, [inaudible 01:07:49], we can't or shouldn't be going down the street to shop or to bank, and that might've been our primary way of doing those things. But when we're essentially being forced into an online channel for our own safety, it means that the importance of having a usable accessible experience is even more important than we've seen in the past. Yes we have a small worry that because of the impact and the follow on effects of COVID-19, that accessibility will be put on the back burner due to budgetary constraints that might be coming through, unfortunately that is a potential reality. But in the meantime I think it also is a possible opportunity to really shine a light on the importance of accessible communications and accessible services online.

Will Butler:

If we bake it in they can't take it off of the cake, right.

Sarah Pulis:

That's right.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Absolutely. And if you think about Zoom for instance, they invested in accessibility well before all this happened and look how much that's paying off now.

Sarah Pulis:

Absolutely.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Because everyone's using Zoom and hey, it just happens to be a pretty accessible product, so that I think is a wonderful case study in why accessibility matters so much and why we shouldn't wait until we need it, but just have it to begin with.

Sarah Pulis:

Absolutely.

Will Butler:

Let them eat cake or something. Anyway, I'm hungry, sorry.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Let them bite cake, A11y Bytes., A11y Bytes some cake.

Will Butler:

Guys, it's really been awesome to talk to you both and to get to know you both. I know Cordelia knew you both before but I'm so impressed with all the work you've been doing. Thanks for joining us today.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Yeah, thank you so much.

Andrew Arch:

You're very welcome.

Sarah Pulis:

Thanks so much Will, thanks Cordelia.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Thank you and thanks for, I feel like I'm going to be thinking a lot more about metadata now, so thanks for that.

Will Butler:

What should we title this episode. I'm all about the title.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

It's got to include metadata in some way.

Andrew Arch:

Micro content.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Oh, micro content.

Will Butler:

Yeah, it is, it is. It's such a crucial form of micro content.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

We'll ponder this.

Will Butler:

Micro content [crosstalk 01:10:19].

Andrew Arch:

[crosstalk 01:10:20].

Will Butler:

From micro content to metadata, that would be a podcast episode that no one would ever click on.

Andrew Arch:

Accessibility [crosstalk 01:10:27].

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

From micro... Oh, I have one, from micro content to microphone difficulties. We managed to-

Will Butler:

Also an episode no one would ever click on.

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

We managed to do an awesome... So yeah, thank you both for your time and it's been so great to chat over the airwaves with you. I hope we can see you in person someday soon.

Andrew Arch:

It's been a pleasure, yes, I was just going to conclude and say hopefully the travel bans will be lifted in the not too distant foreseeable future and we'll be able to catch up in person and read the body language as well as the vocal [inaudible 01:11:04].

Cordelia McGee-Tubb:

Yeah.

Will Butler:

Thanks again so Sarah Pulis and Andrew Arch for joining us from Intopia. Good luck to everyone down there in Australia as we start to come out of these strange times and thanks as always to my cohost Cordelia McGee-Tubb. You can email us at 13 letters, that's 1-3 letters@bemyeyes.com. Review us on Apple or Google podcasts, give us your feedback, tell us who you'd like to see on the show and we'll see you again next week. Thanks everybody.