Talking to people with Disabilities about Digital Accessibility

Today we’re giving you a chance to listen to the perspectives of a couple of people with different types of conditions. This is a taste of what we term Speed Dating that we’ve been doing for years, and it really, really kind of helps people. We hope you’re going to come out of this session thinking differently. Maybe more passionate about accessibility because you’ve heard some of the people who you’re doing it for, and the reasons why they want what they want and maybe they don’t want you to do things in particular ways that don’t work for them.

So this is hopefully a really great way of getting you up to speed on how human accessibility can be, how important it is. And we hope that if you like this, you’ll be able to share this with colleagues of yours to kind of bring them on board as well.

Presenting today, myself, Jonathan Hassell. I’m CEO of Hassell Inclusion. I’ve been doing this accessibility thing for far more years than I care to mention. It’s at least 23 now, I think. I have Leon and Nikki with me today. I’m not going to say anything more about them at this point because actually that’s part of the experience when you’re listening to them. I like them to say things about themselves, which is exactly what today is all about.

But just to kind of put this into a little bit of context, why is it useful to listen to people who have disabilities, who have access needs because surely WCAG just kind of gives you everything. Well, it really doesn’t. So the first thing to kind of note is that around about 40% of the people in most countries have some form of access needs. It generally comes out around about 20% of people with a disability, another 20% of people who may not consider themselves to have a disability, but have some of the same access needs due to ageing.

So we are talking about a lot of people here who really are happy that you’re on this call. And in general, what people with access needs really want is not accessibility, it’s not even usability. What it is is the same thing that you’re trying to give everybody else, which is a great user experience of whatever website, app, service, whatever it is that you’re creating. You want everybody, if you like, to get the right value out of it. All of us who work in digital put a lot of time and effort in, you want to be able to make sure that everybody appreciates that. And that’s what we’re about. And if you look at the definition of usability, it’s not just about whether or not people can do things, that’s effectiveness, whether or not, you know, I can do that thing I came to your website to do. It also includes efficiency, how quickly I can do it, and what I want to repeat that experience, but also satisfaction. Is it something that I would actually recommend to my friends? If that is what you’re going after for everybody else who is coming to your website, your app, your digital tool, then ideally people who have access needs will get exactly the same thing.

So that’s why it’s really important to go beyond WCAG. Most of the time people kind of do audits, they might do a bit of testing with assistive technologies, but they don’t talk to real people. They don’t do the things that they do for other sort of groups of people in usability studies. And today, we’re actually saying why it’s so important to do that. Because the way we tend to think about, if you like, testing to see whether or not your product is good when it comes to the experience it gives people with access needs, there are kind of two ways to look at it.

The first way is what we call the specification sheet way. So just imagine for a moment that you’re buying a new car. If you go into the car showroom and you see that car possibly revolving on some sort of plinth or something and then there’s the specification sheet that tells you all about, you know, its brake, horsepower, and all of these sorts of things, my guess is that if you look at it and go, “Wow, that looks brilliant,” and take that to the guy who’s running the showroom and say, “I’ll have one of those please,” they’ll probably say ‘don’t you want to test drive it first?’

And that is really what we’re about. If you’re like WCAG and audits give you that specification sheet test, is it built right? That’s not enough. Loads of cars can be built right, but not every car is going to give you the right experience when you get into it and press the accelerator. And that is what usability testing in general is all about. It’s not enough to build it right; it’s the experience that matters. And talking about that experience, if you look at the research, what people have found, and this is a study from a long time ago, this is a study from my alma mater, this is University of York here in the UK, they asked 32 blind users to use 16 websites, and they found 1,383 problems that those people had. When they compared those to the sort of stuff that was there in WCAG, they found that only half of the things that were problematic were actually things that could be fixed by fixing things to be WCAG compliance. Now this is a while ago, that was WCAG Version 2, but that was only people who are blind.

There is so much more than WCAG that you need to do. And actually, that assumes that WCAG includes the needs of all people who have an access need. Unfortunately, I’m here to tell you that really isn’t the case, and it’s one of the reasons why I’ve picked the two people today very specifically for that. The needs, for example, of people who are autistic are not very well-displayed, if you like, and considered by WCAG. That’s actually one of the reasons why we do a lot of this sort of stuff. Because people who care about that, say the National Autistic Society here in the UK said, well, we need our sites to be good for people who are autistic.

It’s really confusing out there. WCAG doesn’t say very much. A few studies we’ve seen say things, but they all clash with each other. You know, what do we do? How do we make sense of this? The way we made sense of this when creating guidelines for them was to do an online survey with 400 people and focus groups with up to 20. That’s the sort of thing that enables you to really understand what people actually need, if you like. That was the sort of stuff that was behind WCAG; it just wasn’t done for everybody.

So, Nikki, who’s autistic, is a really great example of what is missing there in WCAG at the moment. Leon, who’s older, is also the other, if you like, example of what’s missing. So WCAG has done some really good stuff around the needs of the older people, but it’s not really gone into the main body of WCAG. So this will give you some of the stuff that you’re missing. So user testing, really, really important. User research is even better than user testing. So you can imagine that there’s lots of different groups of people with disabilities out there. Those existing guidelines that WCAG will tell you something about most of their needs for a notional generic digital product. So WCAG had in their mind websites, just standard websites.

But what about your product? You know, you could be coming at this from the perspective of how does it work in e-commerce. You could be coming at this with the perspective of banking or general information that government or local councils would provide. What about how people, who actually have access needs, think about what they would want from your product? WCAG won’t give you anything like that. All you really need to do is to listen. And so that’s the sort of thing you’re probably doing in user research already. We want you to be thinking about that from a disability perspective as well.

Here’s an example of something that kind of happens when you do do that. This is an example where we were looking at airlines. So this is Toby, a very good friend of mine. He has a condition that means he uses a motorised wheelchair. He uses speech recognition to control his computer, and he doesn’t use his hands quite so much. What he found was that a solution to watching videos on flights that was really, really cheap and had not even considered accessibility was miles more accessible for him than actually all of the work that a lot of airlines had been doing to try and make those screens in the back of seats in front of you accessible. None of that helped him one little bit. The simple thing that actually allowed him to get that video on his iPad was the thing that really worked.

Now, what we want is for organisations to actually understand that sort of thing. Accessibility can cost. And so what you need to do when you’re thinking about where to spend your money, ideally, is to listen to people about what matters for them. So that’s what you’re going to get today, and that’s what you get in Speed Dating. So this is your chance to listen to our participants, to ask some questions, you’ll be doing that through the chat, and we’re going to be trying to enable all of that to happen. Just a couple of things before we kind of jump in with Leon. The first thing to say is that Leon and Nikki are not representative of every single person who’s older or every single person who’s autistic in the world. You know, people are people, and people have their own preferences. But if you’ve never listened to somebody who’s older talk about how they use things, Leon is a very, very good guide. Similarly, Nikki is an incredibly good guide for enabling you to understand the world of autism. But these things are a spectrum. So just because they said it doesn’t mean that everybody with the similar condition may want the same thing.

We’re going to have kind of two 18-minute sessions, one with Leon, one with Nikki. They’re going to talk about who they are, what their condition is, how it affects them, what technologies they use, what makes, if you like, a good or bad website for them. We’re probably going to touch on customer service as well because it’s so important. Normally, if this were a normal Speed Dating session, I’d have asked them to look at the websites of the company we were doing that Speed Dating for.

We now have, you know, over 100 people on the call from all sorts of different companies. So we’re going to ask them to say some general things that they’ve kind of built up as kind of key insights over the years. But if we were to do this for you in your organisation, we would be doing this specifically for what you do. The sorts of things that you can ask. Yeah, how do they feel about your industry? What’s really, really important in e-commerce, or travel, or retail, or whatever it is? If there are particular questions you’ve always wanted to ask, then this is a good time to do it. Please note, though, we’ve got over 100 people on the call. So we may not pick your question, sorry.

But a really key thing, and it’s going to be there, especially in Nikki’s sort of chat, is how accessibility is not just about your websites; it’s about the user journey that people go through all the way from, if you like, buying a product on your site, getting the information that yes, you know, the company has received your order, it’s on its way. Everything from it arriving, returns, all of that. That whole user journey type thing is actually very apparent in a lot of different digital experiences. So we’re going to be looking at that, too. So yeah, your chance of asking a question is to pop it in the chat. I’ve got Pete and Liam who are going to be finding the best ones and trying to channel them in my direction, and that’s where we’re at.

So normally, we do this with six people. Today, we’re going to be giving you two of those, and we’re going to be starting with Leon. So I’m going to stop sharing my screen and I’m going to bring it across here. I’m going to pin Leon so I can see him well. Hi, Leon. How are you doing?

I’m fine. Thanks, Jonathan.

Good. So what we want to do is to hear a little bit about yourself, and then we’ll take things from there. So over to you, Leon.

Okay. My name’s Leon Kreitzman, and the first important fact that you should all know is that I’m 80 next month. So happy birthday and all the rest. [LAUGHTER] But that’s the first thing, age in itself is an impairment. Don’t believe it if people tell you that age is just a number, simply not true. Anybody who gets to the sort of age that I’ve got to can tell you about the various impairments that exist. Some of them are just a process of ageing. You lose muscle strength, you lose muscle mass, so carrying things gets more difficult. The vision of the 80-year-old, nearly every 80-year-old wears glasses. What they don’t tell you is that, whilst you manage with, say, varifocals for many years, as you progressively age, it gets harder and harder to use varifocals. So you revert to, well, I’ve got three pairs of glasses: one for distance, one for the PC screen distance, and one for close-up reading. But just think for a moment what that requires. It means that whenever I go anywhere or do anything or look at anything, I have to decide which of the sets of glasses I have. I then have to remember to take that one off and put the other one off when I change task. Not necessarily something that happens automatically as you age.

The second thing, which in my case is congenital, but in many people who are old is simply an ageing process, is sound. We do not hear. In fact, something like, I don’t know what it is in the UK the latest figure, about 40% of 65-year-olds ought to present for hearing loss. Most don’t. People simply don’t do it, but you lose the audio quality. The third thing is an impairment that I have, which is a sensory impairment. I have something called peripheral neuropathy. I’ve got no sense of touch, so I cannot feel anything with my fingers. I can’t do up a button because I just simply can’t feel that I’m holding something. That means that using screens, using mobile phones where you have to swipe, using a keyboard, where you ought to have some tactile response, I do not get. So I have difficulties with anything which involves having to touch a screen or to type on a keyboard. And peripheral neuropathy, 50% of people who have it have it through diabetes, the other 50%, in my case, for example, is idiopathic. They do not know why, but it is not an uncommon condition. It’s progressive, it gets worse.

So those are the three sensory conditions for me: hearing, vision, and touch. It only leaves two, and smell and taste don’t actually come into it when you’re looking at screens. But there’s also motor impairment. As a result of the sensory deprivation, you can’t see it, but I have got mobility problems and I’ve got balance problems. Again, balance is something which older people tend to have problems with and that affects them in particular, let’s say retail situations, or attending sports events, or doing all sorts of things, like travelling on an escalator in the London Underground. And then there’s other sorts of impairments because whilst I’ve given you the sort of physical nature, you have to appreciate that there’s also a mental and emotional side to it all.

And there’s also a time context. So for example, you have to look at the nature of the impairment and the severity of the impairment. People have peripheral neuropathy, the sense of touch lost. In my case, it’s total. In other people, starting out on the 20 years or so that you can have this condition, you can have some sort of touch at the start, but it gets worse and eventually diminishes. So there’s the severity, the nature of the impairment, the physical context that you’re in. If something’s been really well-designed and it’s designed in a way to enable older people or impaired people, actually fully disabled people to function, you can manage without necessarily noticing the design that has been done that does that.

Let me give you an example. About 50 odd years ago now, I worked for Ford of Europe. Ford Motor Company was starting off to get an integrated European organisation. And one of the things that we looked at then was older people. We took a bunch of 65-year-olds, 65-70, and divide them into two lots of 10, and we put them into what looked like absolutely identical cars. And they were, to all intents and purposes, identical and said, “Go off. Go and drive them, come back.” They did all that and said, “Well, what did you notice? Which one didn’t you prefer?” And they overwhelmingly, and I think it was something like 80% preferred one of the two groups of vehicles. What they didn’t know that the only difference between the two vehicles was that we’d exaggerated the interior textures. The dashboard was a bit rougher, the seating was a bit harsher, everything was exaggerated. They didn’t realise that their sense of touch had diminished with age, but it was only when we told them afterwards that the reasons that they gave for the preferring one vehicle to another was purely because of something they hadn’t actually been able to articulate, which was the sense of touch, which they felt because it had been exaggerated.

And that’s one of the big problems in dealing with old customers. It really doesn’t matter what age, but particularly when they’re older or they may be impaired, is trying to get them to actually articulate needs because it’s difficult in many cases. Straightforward ones are easy, but most people simply cannot articulate their actual needs. And these needs may vary. They may vary with the time of day, how you’re feeling, your emotional aspects, your mental states. And as you do get old or as you are, if you like, sometimes disabled, one of the things that happen is you tend to be much more anxious about things. You’re anxious because everything takes longer. So if you’re making a transaction, doing something, you know that it’s taking longer than it would for somebody who can manage it much more easily.

So my age with my lack of touch, getting the wallet, for instance, out of my pocket, trouser pocket is a performance. It’s quite a saga. I can’t just automatically put my hand in my pocket because I don’t know what I’m feeling. But if I can get something I didn’t have to try and extricate it and do it, then trying to get a card out of the sort of container bit that it’s in and offer that to the assistant at the till all takes a bit longer. There might be people starting to queue behind me. I start to get more anxious, even though I know it’s not my fault.

And so dealing with a group of people, and it’s a huge group of people, I’m talking about 35% of the population, if you take age and disabled and what have you, who are in that mental state, mental condition, which isn’t necessarily one that younger people recognise or realise. I certainly didn’t and I didn’t see it in my parents until they were really quite old then I realised that they weren’t as competent mentally, let alone physically as they had been, even though they weren’t showing traces of any sort of mental or cognitive disability itself.

Leon, can I stop you there for a second? Can we kind of segue across to? So I mean, you’re painting a really useful picture in terms of multiple needs. Oftentimes not understanding, you know, how to articulate those and how things, if you like, progress. Can we move through? So in terms of kind of digital stuff, say, for example, you know, digital banking or something like that, how do those kind of challenges that you have impact what you think is a good website or a good way of doing things digitally and a bad one?

Right. Well, if we’re looking particularly just at websites, I think one of the issues with visual problems, or ageing problems, or disability problems is that seeing is not necessarily the same as perceiving. I think you find, particularly as people age, you could well say, “Did you not see it?” And they will say, “No, I didn’t see,” even though they were looking straight at it. And I think that this is a distinction that isn’t necessarily realised all the time. Because I do think it’s not necessarily just tunnel vision in the actual physical sense, if your field of perception just narrows, it’s actually a sort of tunnel vision in an actual mental sense that you tend to possibly see what you particularly were just going to look at and you don’t see everything else. That famous one is there’s a basketball game, and a monkey, and the man in a costume runs across, and nobody sees the man in a costume. When you get older, that’s true all the time.

Sure. So I mean, so just the size of text and things like that sort of impacts on that?

Well, it’s not so much as the physical size of the text; it’s how much clutter there is. It’s whether or not you’re being guided from the point you want to be at to the next point you want to be at, or whether or not it’s all being encoded. And so you have to try and make sense of it. If it’s really, really simple press button A. Now go to press button B. Now go to press button C. But if you’re supposed to, oh, by the way, I didn’t notice that button C wasn’t where I was expecting it to be or there’s a bit of text that I didn’t notice there that I was supposed to press to move ahead, then I think people tend to get really quite lost. It has to be done. I think particularly if you’re looking at age as opposed to just, you know, impairment, it has to meet the expectation. People who get older expecting the next step to be A or B to C, to D, to E, to F and they expect to be led through that. Not have to try to make those decisions themselves because you don’t have that intuitive sense anymore.

Yeah. Can I ask a really interesting question came through? Is there anything about the tone of voice used in that information that makes things either easier or kind of harder in terms of the words people use?

The words themselves aren’t the problem. The problem, as people age, one of their hearing problem is they hear sounds, but they don’t differentiate words. So for example, if somebody like me, I got a fairly common hearing loss. It’s essentially hearing loss, a nerve ending loss, I can go to the theatre, I can hear actors saying things, I can’t distinguish the words. So I have to have captions or whatever.

And this is true also when you’re talking to a screen. So in a sense, you almost have to have a pause between words to actually be able to distinguish and differentiate. And that’s quite a common hearing loss problem, as I understand it, and that’s something that affects me. So the key things for websites are, A, utterly simple. B, they follow through what you expect them to be doing. Not to try to be clever, not to try to add things, just do it really, really simply, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and this is what you end up doing, and give them time to do it. Don’t have the screen move on or anything like that because everything takes time. Have the various, if you notice, for example, you may have a little dot which is on or it’s off. You have to move it from one side to the other. Make that big so that they’re easy to see that you move it from one side to the other if you want it on. Use simple colours, not garish colours. Make it quite straightforward, but declutter the screens is the main thing that I find. Less is more.

The old saying less is better. Now that’s on a PC screen. On a mobile screen, because as I said, the idea of touching and swiping, and your relatively small text, and you have to distinguish between things which are quite close together, it’s really easy to start making mistakes. That’s one of the things that I find. So for example, at the moment, for reasons I won’t bore you with, I have difficulty accessing my bank details on a PC. I can get it on a phone. I can do the simplest of things on a phone.

How much is in my account? I’ve got several accounts, different things, but what I can’t do is anything detail. If I wanted to look up my direct debit, did I do something other? I find it really, really difficult to get beyond really simple things. So I cannot rely just on a phone to do my banking. I cannot rely on a phone to do most things.

Yeah. I mean, so talk me through. So, say, for example, something’s not working well for you and you kind of want to complain or whatever, the phone isn’t a good way of doing it for you. What about those kind of like those kind of live text, kind of chat things that you can kind of type in, is that helpful?

No. The thing that I probably hate most in this life, apart from some politicians I won’t mention, is the live chat box. I find it difficult to type. The live chat box is really quite small to see the text that you’re allegedly typing coming up on the screen. I find it insulting, actually insulting, when I get a message from the live chat person saying, are you still typing because you’ve not done anything for a while? The live chat is useless to anybody with any tactile impairment. Quite useless.

Sure. What about speech input? So have you ever tried that?

Yeah. I’ve try speech input. I found it fine for really straightforward thing. But as soon as there’s a word that’s at all unusual, or not even that unusual, it breaks down. I’ve not yet found a speech thing that I can get the facility with to actually be confident of using and that it deals with the various, whatever the words are, that I happen to be using. I mean, this ought to be okay because they’re not that complicated. I also find that the biggest problem, I mean, it’s really got nothing to do with the chats, most customer service activities, I have to say this, quite frankly, that I’ve dealt with, and it’s quite a lot, they really are pretty useless. Nobody wants to take ownership of the problem and say, “I’ll resolve the problem for you.” What they will do is, like any bureaucracy, defend their own interests. So I’ve had people say to me things like, well, something didn’t happen, but it wasn’t our team. Frankly, it’s the customer. I don’t care which team you’re on. You’re the company, you’re trying to sell me something. Don’t tell me it wasn’t your team, solve the problem.

Thank you, Leon. That’s wonderful. We could listen to you all day, but I need to move across to Nikki now. Leon, thank you so much for that. That’s been really helpful. In fact, I think there was somebody on the chat who has a similar condition touch-wise to you. So I think there was some really sort of nice on that one. That’s great. Okay. I’m going to move across now to Nikki.

So, Nikki, thank you for your patience, as we were listening to Leon, I know we always kind of learn a lot from each other on these things. So it’s good. And I’m guessing that some of the things that he was talking about you sort of resonated with and other things, not so much. So, Nikki, can you tell us something about you?

Hi. Thank you. First of all, Leon, so many things you said I completely relate to and agree with as somebody who self-identifies as autistic. I have a history of difficulties with mental health, which occurred, largely speaking, because I’ve never been diagnosed with autism or didn’t realise I was autistic. I also didn’t realise that I have tinnitus. Why would I? I just thought it was normal to hear all these different sounds. And when I get very stressed, I experience visual impairments, blurring. So actually, the visual side of things is it’s extremely important that I can personalise that experience. It’s extremely important that I can personalise my auditory experience, and boy, is it important that I can personalise my information experience.

So to have control over how much information I see when I see it and how it’s shared with me. Very, very important. And the best way of explaining why is not my words, but an extract from a poem by an autistic woman who was actually one of the reasons I started to understand myself as an autistic person. “Your customs are strange to me, though I was born among them. I fear your people, your places, you. Accept me as I accept you, and understand that I’m different.”

It’s a beautiful poem. I think I’ve shared the link with you, Jonathan. But I think for me, it captured, in a very short bit, how I’ve actually spent most of my life feeling this real sense of disconnection from the world around me, this sense of utter confusion about why things often work in the way they do, an utter sense of powerlessness in terms of some of the things that Leon described. We have customer service, which just isn’t what it says on the tin. It doesn’t provide me with a service. It serves the organisation, not me. So why is it called customer service, if it doesn’t meet my needs? So it really kind of captured it, I think, really well for me.

I can give you an example. Look at Zoom here right now. I hate being on video, just in the same way I hate standing up and doing presentations in front of loads of people, because what I’m looking at is everybody looking at me. So if everybody had their video on right now, it would be an absolute information overload for me because my brain would be going, “Oh, what’s that sitting behind that person? Oh, who’s that just walked behind them?” It’s just a whole load of clutter in my brain. In my brain, I’m trying to go, “No, don’t look at that.” So that’s taking up the sensory and the processing power that I need to focus on the thing that I want to do. Actually, for me, it’s a massive relief when videos are off, when I don’t have to look and consider that complexity.

But I also appreciate that in certain situations, it’s really important that for some people actually that video information may meet their needs. So therefore, it isn’t necessarily simple. We have to be nuanced in the way that we think about things and not make assumptions. In terms of the examples that Jonathan gave today, I mean, I was really pleased to see the National Autistic Society featured as an example there because I participated in their research in terms of how they could improve their website. And I think making it as quick and easy for your customers to personalise the experience, their experience of your entire end-to-end business, not just the website, not just one part of it, but the entire end-to-end experience is going to save you money and it’s going to make your customers happy. So why wouldn’t you do it? It really is a much smarter way of working, and the National Autistic Society, in their website, they made it really easy to write on the front page just entirely personalise the experience because they understand that that is a gateway to the rest of their services. And so it really matters to do that.

I would like to see organisations provide a lot more opportunity to enable me a bit like I do with my bank where I have a secure login, where I can go in and I can define, I can set what all my preferences and needs are. And also, that if I choose to participate in the chat, which I agree with Leon, most of the chat is utterly useless, but if I participate in chat, I want to see what I chatted before. If I’m going to communicate with you using audio and you’re telling me this is being recorded for training purposes, well, make those recordings available for me for memory purposes. Because often I can’t remember what I said, because I’m so stressed out at the time, and it’s actually quite useful for me to be able to listen to that information back. If you’re recording it, share it back with me. It’s my data as much as yours. And then also it means we’ve got all this stuff in the same place, so I don’t need to contact you as much. And I can self-service more, which if I understand all organisation is, you know, everybody wants avoidable contact. They want people to be more self-sufficient, so make that easier for me. When I access services is incredibly important.

I’m so frustrated with supermarkets. I think all supermarkets are so way off the mark at the moment in terms of how they deliver services, but they’re not alone. There’s all these separate ways of interacting. You can go to the store, you can shop online, you can have an app, you can self-scan. Fantastic. Why aren’t they all joined up? Why isn’t there one backend where I can go in, I can tell you all my preferences and needs, I can see when the shop is open, I can see the times when it’s busy. You must have a sense, your tills processing all this data, that you must be able to show me back when the quieter times even of an individual day are. Because actually I actively prefer to shop when it’s less busy, because I do like and often need human interaction. Particularly, if I get stressed out, I might need to look for the person wearing the sunflower lanyard so that I know that they’re autistic themselves or they’re autism aware. So if I’m getting stressed out, they’re a good person for me to go and speak to, to get the support that’s going to meet my needs.

So absolutely, you know, anything digital is not just about websites; it is the end-to-end service. My mobile phone, I work in digital. I go to work with avatars. That’s how I choose to work because I find the sensory experience of using an avatar much easier than videos and place-based interactions. But I’m very careful about how I use my mobile phone. I use it for authentication. I tend not to actually access services on it because I find the screen size awkward, much easier, and I feels much safer to do it on a private big screen at home where I know nobody can oversee over what I’m typing in and see my screen. I’m very, very cautious about that. I did also really want to highlight security and identity as massive, massive issues. I really take that stuff seriously. How you ask me to prove my identity, how you store my data, how you use my data. These are all things I look at very carefully. And I will avoid using your services, if I don’t think that your approach is safe, or ethical, or secure enough. So I really take that stuff seriously.

I know most organisations try to, but they don’t often think about that from an accessibility point of view. I can give you a case in point today. Just apply for an energy savings loan. Oh my goodness. I can’t sign my form and post it in. I’ve got to photograph it or scan it. Well, I don’t have a scanner. I’m really unhappy about photographing and sending in my signature on a photograph just via email. Really? I don’t like having to do that, but I’ve been forced to use a system that I know is not only inappropriate in my view for me and makes me feel anxious and stressed, it’s also time-consuming and I’m sitting there feeling really angry because I know how inaccessible that is to so many older people who desperately need home energy savings loans. So it’s really worth putting in the effort to thinking about accessibility not in terms of accessibility. I actually wrote it down inspired by Leon. Right information at the right time to meet the individual’s needs. And that quite means that you need to enable the individual to personalise and to ensure that it produces the right result in a safe way.

So it’s all about context, timeliness, relevance, and meeting needs, and I don’t mean it in those orders. Meeting needs should be first and foremost. And the other thing is don’t lie to me. I am so tired of sitting on waiting telephone lines, being told how important my customer is to me, and then kept waiting for 45 minutes. It’s not. Don’t lie to me. Don’t say something that’s not true. Just tell me factually how long I’ve got to wait for or tell me when I can phone back and when it will be less busy. And stop, it doesn’t matter what accreditations you’ve got or you’ve achieved in the past, if you’re not meeting those standards now, manage my expectations. If you really want to turn me off, disappoint me, promise something that you can’t deliver. I think people forget that when I get stressed, it’s already on top of a bucket load of sensory overload which actually at its extreme, causes me physical pain and acute mental distress, and then you wonder why I get a bit irritated with your stuff. I don’t mean to be irritated with them; it’s just I’m already. You know, a lot of the way I’m reacting is because of pain I’ve been caused. So take it away. Help me remove all of that, and then everything’s going to be better for everyone.

Can I pause you there for a second? Let’s do a couple of quick things because I think I probably know what your response is going to be to these. A website with kind of like animations and sort of moving carousels and things like that. Is that okay?

Again, I don’t want to generalise on that. There’ll be days where I just need to turn it all off and I need to flip it so that I’ve got a black background and bright text. Because for whatever reason, that feels better that day. I certainly don’t want things to be pushed to me. I want to be able to opt in and out things. And I know that’s difficult because everybody thinks with advertising, you got to push stuff to people. I don’t buy that way. I think there’s a lot of myths here. You know, I buy from organisations that have good quality products and respect that I don’t want information shoved in my face the whole time. I make selective buying decisions. So give me the space to tell me what I’m interested in and tell me how I want to receive that information, you know, and how I can click through to see it, rather than shoving it in my face the whole time. So control is massively important.

What about timeout? So you’re going through a process and it’s now hurrying you up. How’s that?

Yeah. That’s not going to work. That’s going to have a perverse effect. Allow me to come back later. I saw somebody ask a question about progress bars. I personally quite like progress bars. I like being able to save my progress and come back to it later. If I got questions about what I’m progressing, I need to be able to ask the question and then be able to refer back to the question that I asked and the answer that I got. So a bit like you have when you’re sharing a Google document and you’ve got the comments in the chats. Actually, just having it disappeared into these is a sort of a waste of energy. Keep it associated with the thing that I’m trying to progress for through, and then I’ve got it all there to refer back to you later.

Sure. So I mean, one of the things that you were talking about, that personalization control on the autism side, it just does that thing, but it doesn’t promise to do stuff that it can’t do. There are these things called kind of like, you know, you see accessibility widgets cropping up everywhere. Are those good things in terms of, you know, how complicated would those things need to be for it to go from something that’s helpful to something that isn’t?

I find that quite a difficult question to answer, Jonathan, because there’s a lot of information in that question and a lot of sub-questions in my head. My head has kind of gone on different directions.

I’ll start again. So accessibility widgets, so those things that allow you to change the way a page looks. The one Autistic Society site that you like literally has kind of like three different buttons. There are widgets that allow you to change absolutely everything, like the colours and the kind of line spacing and all sorts of stuff. Are those more helpful or less?

Again, I think it depends. Personally, I prefer less with the option for more. Because if you present me with everything, I become like a rabbit in the headlights. I’m kind of slightly paralysed, but that won’t be true with everyone. You know, that’s the way I experience information overload. And so it sort of has that impact. But for other people, maybe that meets their needs. So, you know, I think it comes back to this thing, it’s quite hard to generalise these things. But I would certainly say that I don’t necessarily want to have to use a lot of different apps.

There are certain things I just need enough to be able to get through. So for example, I’ve discovered a font on this phone and a setting on this phone, where it just makes everything bigger and a slightly different layout and it’s so much easier. But one of the things I’ve discovered is none of the websites that I use regularly seem to be able to cope with this particular setting that I’ve used. So that’s slightly frustrating. So I do like it when the essential things that you need to customise, like the amount of information that you see. I prefer it when you can go in and ask for more rather than having all of it kind of just in your face.

So it’s more about the amount of information than sort of like, you know, just the kind of like the fonts and things?

Yeah. Because I mean, it’s that thing, is that who are you giving the information for?

Yeah.

Are you saying it because you want to say something, because you want to say it, or is this something that actually somebody else needs?

Sure. Totally. And just one last thing. I mean, you’ve kind of touched on it already, but I think it’s worth kind of reinforcing because I’ve heard this from you on sessions in the past. If there is a website that gives you a bad experience and a website that gives you a good experience, but that website that gives you a good experience has more expensive products, which one do you choose?

My priority, like anybody, is I can’t afford to waste money. I absolutely get that. But I also can’t afford to harm myself through sensory overload that actually creates me mental and physical distress. So I invest in my well-being just in the way that I might join a gym membership. I might choose to pay more for something because it’s not just because it’s a well-designed website. Be very careful. This is not about websites. This is about well-designed, end-to-end experience that harness the potential of technology to reduce the sensory overload on me and to remove barriers that enable me to make the most out of pensions, or flights, or holidays, or supermarkets or whatever it is.

When I look at a website, I want to know that I’m going to be safe, that this organisation understands and respects my needs and is going to make that journey safe for me. Because also the other inevitable and brutal truth is I’m also ageing, and as I age, my capacity to mask some of these things, I’ve spent many years learning how to mask how I feel as an autistic person. Often a great personal cost to myself. But, you know, I’d be trying to fit in and get on all the rest of it, and I didn’t think it was appropriate to make a fuss. But now and as I get older, that’s going to become harder and harder to do. So better the systems are at meeting my needs now. Then the less I grow, I’m going to cause you as a customer when I’m older and the more money I’m going to spend with you. Why wouldn’t you want me to spend my money with you?

That’s awesome. We could be here all day, but unfortunately, the clock is against us. Nikki, thank you so much on. Leon, Thank you so much. That was really good. Hopefully, what all of you on this session will have got from that is that’s just listening to two people. Our Speed Dating kind of brings in perspectives, again, completely different in some places and very similar in other places, from the needs of people who are blind or have vision impairments, people who have things like multiple sclerosis, which is a fluctuating condition, or I may be more impaired on some days than others. Motor difficulties, so people who have, if you like, a slightly different situation to what Leon is going on, but maybe can’t use their hands at all to speak to their computer as their way of doing things all of the time. And people who are dyslexic, these are some of the things that accessibility is about.

Hopefully, now what you’re seeing is that WCAG is a great start, but it’s not the end. So if you’ve enjoyed this, and a number of people have gone, “Can you do more of this?” Because that’s there, that is our Speed Dating. It takes a lot of effort to actually kind of set up these kind of sessions. And we do this for organisations. So we bring in, if you like, those six perspectives. We normally have up to kind of 60 people in an organisation who can kind of hear this. And what hopefully happens in those organisations is the sort of thing which I could see happening there in the chat is that people are going, “Wow, I never would have thought of this,” and suddenly people in organisations get a much bigger world from that. You know, we had one person in UK government saying it was the richest feedback they’ve ever kind of received about their website because it wasn’t stuff that was just they could get from other places.

So if this sounds like it might be something that would be really valuable where you work, then please contact us. You can find that Contact Us form on our website. The other thing and we haven’t really gone into it today, but you can see the sort of kind of depth and interest. We run innovation workshops where we try and prevent that sort of situation that happened with Toby happening before. People spending lots of time and effort on accessibility in the wrong areas. Every single penny that is spent on accessibility that doesn’t help for real people, you know, is the wrong spend. Listening to people can be really helpful and actually saying, okay, so if this isn’t working for you, how will we change this to make this better? We’ve been doing this with healthcare companies. We’re doing, at the moment, with supermarkets. We’ve done it with banks. We’ve done it in all sorts of different places to try and enable those organisations to say, okay, what is the future of ATMs, for example? How would we want to change those so that loads of people who can’t use them at the moment could get a much better experience in the future? Let’s work with them, let’s codesign to make this happen.

Again, if that sounds really interesting to you, we’ve got some stuff on our website about that and a video of Toby and I talking about that. So we do these workshops, if that would be helpful for you to kind of come by. And also, for those on the call who actually do user research and user testing, but you’re not doing it with people with disabilities at the moment, we can help train you in how to get good at this so that you get these sort of insights all of the time. Because our experience, and hopefully yours now, is that listening to people who have different types of conditions normally is a lot more interesting than just listening to another person who might be using your product. This can really help sort of, you know, bring some real fresh perspectives. There will be, as I say, chance to kind of ask your kind of questions to us online.

So find us at contact@hassellinclusion.com, but we’ve only got one minute left in the session. What I wanted to do was to tell you about what’s happening next time on these webinars. So in July, we don’t have one of these. We’re giving ourselves a little bit of a break because people are away for sort of like summer holidays and things like that. I’ll be coming back, I think it’s the 10th of August, and there is a Q&A with me. So I’ve been doing this for a very long time and I’ve been listening to people like Leon and Nikki for a very long time. So I’ve got a lot of experience and can answer a lot of questions. This could be technical, this could be strategic, this could be to do with people’s needs. Whatever it is, if you’re struggling with an aspect of accessibility at the moment, if you would like some help with that and happy for that help to be on this particular sort of public kind of channel, then please book in for our webinar in August.

But I wanted to say thank you so much for all of your time. As I say, if we can help you in any way and if you’ve liked what you’ve heard and you want some more, then please contact us at hassellinclusion.com.

We hope to kind of blow your mind and help accessibility become more relevant to what you do, but also more achievable in what you do every single month. That’s what you get here at Digital Accessibility Experts Live. So thanks so much for your time. We really do appreciate that hour you’ve given us. We hope we’ve given you a lot of insights back.