This week Matt welcomes back Lisa alongside guest Matisse Hamel Nelis to chat about their upcoming book “Accessible Communications: Create Impact, Avoid Missteps and Build Trust.”
The duo spent 18 months crafting what sounds like a much-needed guide to creating digital content that actually works for everyone – not just the mythical “average user” that so much design seems targeted at. They dive into why accessibility isn’t just about compliance checkboxes or helping people with disabilities, but about recognizing that we’re all temporarily disabled at various points (try reading a restaurant menu in candlelight without your reading glasses, or navigating a website on your phone while walking).
The conversation takes some detours through the world of inaccessible tech design, from VR headsets that don’t work with glasses to meeting software that assumes blind people simply wouldn’t use their product. Lisa and Matisse make a compelling case that accessibility problems often stem from a lack of diversity in the rooms where decisions get made, and they share practical tips that anyone can implement immediately – like actually using Word’s heading styles properly, writing descriptive hyperlinks instead of “click here,” and understanding why those bullet point emojis on LinkedIn are driving screen readers bonkers.
The book launches October 3rd in the UK and October 28th in North America.
You can pre-order now from Kogan Page at: https://www.koganpage.com/marketing-communications/accessible-communications-9781398621848
And WB-40 listeners can get a huge 30% discount with the code PUBMON30
This week’s transcript (automatically generated by Descript, so there may be a few oddities)
Matt: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to episode 335 of the WB 40 Podcast This week with me, Matt Ballantine, Lisa Riemers, and Matisse Hamel Nelis.[00:01:00]
Well, it’s been a while and I’m back. Woo hoo. And it’s. Me just presenting on my own or hosting on my own this week, because I’ve got two special guests this week. This, we’re gonna mix it up a bit but one of them is somebody you’re quite familiar with. I’ll talk about all of that in a moment. But Lisa how have you been?
It’s been ages.
Lisa: It has been ages. It’s certainly been ages since we’ve spoken. Although I was on the show I don’t even know what weeks mean anymore. About three beats ago, a couple of episodes ago. Yeah. lot over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been to a couple of different accessibility conferences and meetups.
I got to, on the way up to Newcastle, managed to catch see a Papa Georgio, who’s normally in Australia, but she was flying from Greece into London. Just as I was leaving London. We had half an hour for a coffee at St. Pancreas Station. Went up to [00:02:00] Newcastle for access given, then went up to Edinburgh, got a train down to London, and then flew to Salzburg to then drive to Hoop Holding to go to the Speaker Summit, which I didn’t know apart from.
Having met Marcus online and having met Mark Earls online, I didn’t know anybody there and I basically went there off the strength of your recommendations from last year. ’cause I, and as I said to people while I was there, yeah. That Matt said this was the best thing he’s ever done. And I hate to admit it, but he’s probably right.
Matt: Well, the best thing I’ve ever done isn’t necessarily the best thing you’ve ever done that That’s true. But it’s certainly the best event I’ve ever been to. And like I’ve been to some pretty good events over the years. You know, I’ve talked about it before on the show. I love meeting people in person.
Lisa: But what Marcus has created, it was so well [00:03:00] thought through and. I learnt loads and I got to, I think I improved my speaking abilities while I was there. And although there was, there was a massive transformation overnight from when I did a dry run on the Friday to doing it properly on the Saturday after running part, running it through with our other guests this week, Mattis.
But you know, there was weeks of prep and we spent 18 months writing a book about the subject matter, but it was an overnight, it was an overnight transformation, like in, in such a short period of time. I feel like my ability to tell a story about what we’ve been doing was massively improved. And everybody was lovely and the food was terrific and.
There were tiny Bavarian children dressed up dancing on the last day. And some of it was [00:04:00] really surreal. I got to meet the international, incredibly prolific, despite being, like, considering her age, Brianna Weiss, who’s written 15 books, I got speaking notes from her as her and Marcus sat listening to us do a talk.
Like it was just, I didn’t really know what to expect and I was actually expecting it to not be very good ’cause I had high expectations. And thankfully they were blown away. Like it was so good.
Matt: I, I was so relieved to hear that. And actually there’s a couple of other people who I recommended the thing to, and everybody came back saying it was a fantastic thing for them, which is, I didn’t expect anything other than that.
But it’s, it’s always when you properly recommend something, as opposed to saying on a, a sorting. NPS score that you are likely to recommend something actually properly going out there and going, no, [00:05:00] spend money on this thing. It will be brilliant. That’s proper skin in the game stuff. This is another essay I need to write about how terrible NPS is, is, but no, so pleased, so please, how
Lisa: terrible NPS is part 17.
Oh,
Matt: 1700 probably. There you go. And Matisse, how about you? Welcome to the show. How’s your recent week been?
Matisse: My recent week has been busy with some incredible client work, working on training materials around accessibility and creating accessible communications, which Lisa and I have been writing about.
So it fits right in my wheelhouse. And also doing some presentations for A 11 Y Toronto or accessibility Toronto on the matter of accessible marketing. So it’s been a jam packed week of all things comms and accessibility, which has been fantastic, and
Matt: just to be able to place you. Geographically in the world.
Whereabout, whereabouts are you joining us from?
Matisse: Oshawa, Ontario, which is just outside of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. That’s
Matt: the east side [00:06:00] of East. Are you like erecting walls to be able to protect yourself from the south?
Matisse: It’s interesting times, that’s for sure. I am actually ge gearing up to Head South for a conference at the end of October, which I am not gonna lie a little scared about.
It’s in Washington DC but trying to stay positive and, you know, not say anything too controversial, if you will, and go like that actually. Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. You have to be very careful ’cause anything you say could be listened to and at least you don’t have to fly that far back if you do get turned away at the gates.
Matisse: Exactly, exactly. Luckily in Toronto customs is at the Toronto airport, so if they do turn me away, I just cop in the car and head back home. Excellent.
Matt: That’s great news.
Matisse: Matt, what have you
Lisa: been up to?
Matt: Well, I mean, it’s been a very long time since I was last on the show, so there was summer holidays and trips to Malaysia and Singapore, which is fabulous.
Fabulous. But in the recent week I’ve ended up in a position where I’ve got an awful [00:07:00] lot of business development work mostly because most of my colleagues are working on live gigs and I’m ending up picking up everything else. And it’s just got to now a certain point where I’m starting to get scared that if we win more than one or two of them there’s a workload problem, especially ’cause I found out recently I, I’m going to be doing jury service.
At the end of October, which adds a certain free song to the whole thing, which is good fun. And then, so yeah, just lots of stuff going on. Lots of really interesting conversations. Actually getting to spend some time with clients, although we’re not at the actually engaged with them yet, but really interesting.
Actually, we ran a workshop last week for about four and a half hours with a company that we’ve been talking with and actually said to them, can we come in and get some of your people in the room and we can talk to you about what it is your challenges are? And it just changes the dynamic of then we can say, look, this is what we think you should do.
And we can say that in a way that if you just have the paper exercises of [00:08:00] typical procurement exercises, it’s all weird made up stuff and it’s so nice to have proper engagement with people to try to work out how and if we can help them. So that was good. Other than that last week was my mother’s 80th birthday, and so on Saturday we did.
A drive up to Suffolk where they live up to rural Suffolk and had a nice lunch and then drove all the way back. It’s quite a long way to go. It’s about three, three and a half hours. So it was a lot of driving, but it was good to see her. She’s in very good form and I’m taking her away to Venice for a weekend in a couple of weekends time as her 80th birthday present.
So I’m looking forward to that as well. And other than that, just the day-to-day trials and tribulations of being a parent of two teenagers, you know, that’s the way it goes.
Lisa: Lovely.
Matt: So on this week’s show, we are going to be talking to the two of you. I, I am going to be talking to the two of you.
You’ll will be talking as well, hopefully. So it’s gonna be a very dull show indeed. [00:09:00] And we’re gonna be talking about the work you have been doing over the last 18 months into your book. So I suggest we should probably crack on.
So another book is being brought into the world and you two are responsible for it. Tell us a little bit about what it’s about.
Matisse: So just like the title says, it’s all about accessible [00:10:00] communications. So creating accessible documents, how we write in plain language, making sure that the most people have access to the content that we’re sharing, and understanding it in an easy way.
You know, our book is called Accessible Communications. Create Impact, avoid Missteps and Build Trust. And we believe that when you are being accessible we’re able to really. Communicate effectively or more effectively with our target audience and those that we may not even think are our audience, but actually are as well.
And it’s not just communication professionals that need to communicate accessibly, it’s anybody who communicates. That’s sort of our philosophy behind this. So when I thought of the idea of, you know, there isn’t anything on the market around accessible communications, and I for one wish, I had known that when I first started out in the industry what it was I knew it was something I couldn’t take on by myself.
I knew somebody amazing who would be an incredible partner, and that was Lisa. And luckily she heard my idea, didn’t run the other way [00:11:00] and jumped on board and said, yes, let’s do this. And so you know, we thought that we could fill this gap that is so desperately needed in the communication space in particular around accessibility because as Lisa and I have been talking about quite a lot lately, it’s not taught in curriculum.
So we have all these communication professionals graduating schools where there’s legislation already in place around the world, but not knowing how to meet their legislative requirements to be accessible. So we just thought, hey, we can be that stepping stone and help people get in there in an easy, accessible way.
Matt: So can we just unpack the title a little bit just for making sure that everybody in the audience understands where it’s coming from. So let’s talk first of all about communication. What sorts of communication are you talking about?
Matisse: We are talking particularly about digital communication, so anything in the online space, but we also do talk, touch on concepts like your print documents so think posters and things like that.
What fonts we’re using. Color contrast but primarily we’re looking at [00:12:00] the digital space, so web content, social media, videos, podcasts you know, anything that is in the digital realm, making sure that that is accessible and easily digestible, if you will, for everybody who’s trying to access it.
Matt: And then you can imagine what questions coming next, the accessibility piece here.
Can you give us a, a broad definition about what accessibility means in this context?
Matisse: Yeah, so I would, for this, I would say that accessibility means ensuring that anybody, regardless of ability or disability, is able to access information independently online. So if they’re using something like assistive technology like a screen reader for example, where it’s text speech they’re able to navigate it if they have site loss on their own and be able to get the same information and the same content out of it and context independently versus requiring somebody else to read it out to them, if you will.
If it’s a podcast or a video, having captions and [00:13:00] described audio to ensure that everybody can access the information, things like that. So really ensuring that our digital presence is available to anybody and everybody in an easy to use way.
Lisa: something that I’ve got in common with Jay Rayna, the food critic, is, you know, if you go out to a restaurant and you try and read the menu and you can’t read it because you’ve got gray text on a light gray background and it’s a tiny italicized font and you’ve got candle light and you know, it could be that your environment is also, you know, we’re all temporarily disabled at different times of the times of our lives and it ruins the vibe much more if you have to get your phone torch out.
I’ve gone out for dinner with people and you see people like that, oh, I’ve forgotten my reading glasses. Or they’ll take a picture of the menu, get their phones out, and then be zooming in and enlarging it or getting their torches out. And it’s one of those [00:14:00] things that affect so many people and when you, and once you start thinking about it, it’s everywhere.
And it’s like one in 10. So, and one in 10 people are are dyslexic. So that’s 10% of people in a room, or, you know, 10, 10% of people are estimated to be dyslexic. So making sure that your words are clear, that your text isn’t in block capitals, that you are making it easy for people to read what you are writing.
You’ve got one in 12 men, a colorblind. So if you’ve got one in 10 people who are dyslexic and one in 12 men that are colorblind, if you’ve got your average board of directors in the uk this is gonna affect what this is gonna affect some of them as well. So it is, we are talking a lot of it comes from the position of making sure that things are meeting our legislative requirements, but it’s not somebody else’s issue.
It’s [00:15:00] everybody’s issue. Something that I was talking about in my little talk in at the Speaky Summit is that it’s not, it’s not what Douglas Adams referred to as somebody else’s problem. A lot of the time accessibility seen as this big complicated thing that you don’t really understand. And actually somebody else must be responsible for this.
There must be someone in it or someone in the digital team or the head of diversity, equity and inclusion that cares about this stuff. But actually there are steps that we can all take to make sure that whatever, whether we are writing a report to people, sending an email, delivering a presentation, it’s something that we can all make clearer because everyone’s tired.
You know, people are stressed, they’re tired, they might be neurodiverse. You wanna make it as easy as possible for people to get your message straight away.
Matt: So, to play devil’s advocate a bit on that, I take something like the, the restaurant example, the challenge is that you run the risk of ending up with a world that [00:16:00] looks like the Gov UK website everywhere.
You end up with something that is ending up so anodyne, so without interest that nothing differentiates,
Lisa: that’s bad design, not accessible design. No, that’s not true. The gov.uk website has been very carefully designed to be nice and clear so you can do exactly what you need to do and move on with your day.
People aren’t coming there to be entertained or to to spend time browsing. They, they’re coming there ’cause they wanna apply for a passport. They wanna do a service, get some advice, and then go again. But accessible design doesn’t have to just be plain. There are so many examples of using beautiful color contrasts of making sure that you’re not overcrowding information in your designs so that your message is impactful and still beautiful.
Yeah, it, I think that is a common myth that accessible design has to [00:17:00] be black and white. And actually a pure black and white contrast is harder to read for some people as well. So, black with off white or dark, dark, almost black with white works a bit better. D within that though, then that whose responsibility is this whilst everybody has to be, have a concern about it and everybody at some point in their lives will be impacted by it one way or another.
Matt: When it actually comes to the execution of making sure that we have good accessible design and digital and other media, that does feel like a designer problem. It’s everybody’s responsibility when it comes down to it because we can’t ask a designer to write copy that is accessible so that it’s in plain language and meeting you know, specific requirements for that reading level.
Matisse: We can’t ask a [00:18:00] designer to create a video that’s accessible that would be part of maybe the communications and marketing team or their videographer if they happen to have somebody like that on the team to understand that it requires captions and that it requires described audio, whether it’s post-production, so that secondary audio layer where it says like, man walks into room, woman sits down, or it’s integrated where it’s.
It’s naturally woven into the script where what you see is what you’re saying as well, but in a more fluid manner. When we’re talking about web stuff you know, the, yes, the web designer and the, or the web developer needs to ensure that the pro programming of the actual website is accessible, but the designer needs to make sure that the color contrast and the flow of the design itself is accessible while the copy, the writer has to ensure that the copy flows well in that too, and is accessible in its own manner.
So everybody ha plays a role in making something accessible. It’s not just that’s it’s problem or that’s the designer’s problem. It’s everybody’s. Not even problem. It’s everybody’s responsibility to ensure that [00:19:00] their portion is accessible and working as a team to say, Hey, how do we ensure that we are meeting everything that we need to meet to be accessible?
How can I support, maybe not even realizing, you know, the designer puts in an image, doesn’t know how to write alternative texts. So describing that image, and that’s where the writer can come in and assist, right? So working as a team to ensure that we’re meeting our responsibilities to be accessible.
Because at the end of the day, it’s not just one person. It’s everybody’s role to ensure that accessibility is there in what we do.
Lisa: I think there’s also something there that if you have brand guidelines, making sure that you are, that there is a color palette that suggested that is accessible. I did some work for a client recently where we were reviewing their existing brand guidelines to make sure that the, that you started out with an accessible template.
But you can have the most accessible template or branding in the going and the content itself or how people use it becomes completely [00:20:00] inaccessible. I had a great example recently where somebody who is quite a senior communications professional so knows how to write has wr also written a book.
And they sent me an email that was a kind of a big block of text and and they were in amongst all of this. They were saying, would you like to come to my book launch? And I replied saying, I’d love to, can you send me the details? And I got a one line email back saying, Lisa, the link was in the email.
I was like, I read it. I’m interested in it. I didn’t expect the sort of frosty response when I was showing interest in going along to it. And it. It hadn’t been written with mobile in mind. The paragraphs were quite lengthy and dense, and the hyperlinks were written as click here. So I didn’t know what the links were and they were beyond the email signature.
So it [00:21:00] just looked like that kind of wallpaper that you see on people’s email signatures, you know, like it, I didn’t realize that that was one of the actions. And I think writing clearly does take longer than that first draft. You know, going back in, putting subheadings in, so it’s easy to scan what’s there, making sure that your hyperlinks are clearly, you’ve got clear text in them.
So there’s action words in there. So you know what click here means. So it’s like, register for our online event, register in person. There are lots of really small tips that people can start doing almost immediately. And as, as Matisse was saying, and as you you were asking it, it is all of our responsibility, but it’s also not necessarily our fault that we don’t know about it ’cause it’s just not been included in education.
It wasn’t in my marketing communications [00:22:00] qualification years ago. It might be now. I haven’t checked the current syllabus, but I doubt it. I know when Matis was integrating accessibility into her PR syllabus that she was teaching, I was blown away by it because it was really integrated and embedded into everything from making videos to social media.
And I think it’s also. Another thing that’s changed with the responsibility of it is now we’re all citizen publishers. We’re all designers. You know, we’re all using these tools to publish stuff online. We are using things like Canva, which does actually have a built in accessibility checker, if you know, to look for it, to help you with your color contrast, your font size.
But we’re all creating stuff now, so we all need to learn to be better at it so that our messages aren’t lost.
Matt: Do you think there’s a, a, a function of the problems that you identify and try to address comes or a, a multi [00:23:00] multiplier? The problems that you address actually comes from a lack of diversity within the professions who are predominantly responsible in the comms world, in the PR world, in the marketing world, and that they bias us towards.
Able-bodied people who are mostly young.
Matisse: I think so, I think because the lived experience isn’t in the room when decisions are being made, when things are being created, when things are just being ideated at that time it gets missed and it’s left as an afterthought. And then, you know, at the end they’re like, oh goodness, we need to make this accessible now and we don’t know how, or it’s gonna be too much on our budget to retrofit a new website to be accessible or to add in the post-production descriptions into a video and things like that.
And that just comes from a, not having the right people in the room b the lack of representation of that lived experience from the disability perspective. And see just the lack of knowing. When I speak at [00:24:00] conferences and do training sessions, commun communication professionals across the board, whether it be in North America or or in Europe, have said, we don’t know what we don’t know.
And that’s why these sessions are so jam packed. With people because they know they have to do it. There are good intentions to want to do it. At least that’s how it comes across, and I’m gonna believe that positively. However, we don’t even know where to start. Even for myself, when I started my career, I started working at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, CNIB.
And on my second day, fresh Outta school, I was asked to. Put out a tweet from the national account and I said, yeah, sure, no problem. You know, back in the days when it was 140 characters, no, you know, no big deal. I’ll put some stat out. So I used the hashtag d, k and some stat, right? For did you know hashtag d, k did, you know, whatever, put it out.
And within 10 minutes, one of my colleagues with site loss called me, and aside from welcoming me to CNIB, was very quick to [00:25:00] say, FYI, your tweet is inappropriate. It comes out as reading as Dick or dyke to a screen reader. And I said, no, no, no, it’s did you know. And he goes, no, no, no, no. That is not how it reads.
Which in that moment, you know, I’m thinking, great, day two, let me pack up my things. I’m fired. Perfect, wonderful. And after he calmed me down, he just sort of said, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that people in communications don’t realize or don’t know when it comes to accessibility or how things are engaged with, from an accessibility perspective when it comes to content that it led me down my path to just say, all right, well.
I need to know this if I’m gonna be communicating with a broad audience. And that sort of led me down a 10 year rabbit hole and then to this book with Lisa. So it’s, we don’t know what we don’t know. But at the same time, we need to be open to asking questions. And I think there’s also that fear of, if I don’t do it right the first time, I’m not gonna do it at all.
I don’t wanna get in trouble. I don’t wanna, you know. Cause any issues or rock any boats, when really, if you’re able to [00:26:00] integrate one thing at a time and practice and get used to it and understand that making mistakes is okay, getting feedback is not a negative. It’s a learning opportunity to do better and to learn more on how to make things a bit more accessible.
It changes that cultural mindset within an organization. So if you don’t have somebody from the disability community on the team who can speak to that lived experience, at least we’re asking questions and bringing in maybe those with lived experience to provide testing and things like that as well.
And I think,
Lisa: sorry, there’s no you going, I also went to a tech show fairly recently where they were demoing one of the, I can’t remember now, whether it’s from Meta or apple, one of the new headsets and it didn’t work with glasses on. So I took my glasses off and I couldn’t see anything because the augmented reality headset, it, it was just all a blur.
Then I spoke to a guy who, and he was [00:27:00] a product manager for this, it was an online meeting software, but it was like augmented reality as well. Like you, you kind of walked in a bit like second Life. It was like a cross between second Life and gather town that you could walk around a 3D campus or or building, walk into a meeting room, have meetings with people in a meeting room, but it looked almost photo realistic.
But I asked him how if someone’s sight wasn’t great or if they had, you know, if they were blind, how would they know that they’d walked into a wall? How would they know that they were stuck in the corner of the room? And he was like, well, I don’t think a blind person would use my software. It’s like, but blind people work.
You know, I remember when I was doing some training at DIT and one of our blind colleagues came in to join the training session with, and I didn’t know who was coming. But thankfully my presentation was accessible because we would, I was doing training on accessible content [00:28:00] and he was able to walk around the building, an actual 3D building, you know, like in person.
And he had his cane and he was able to detect where walls were and he could see where the edges of things were. And I was explaining that to this tech guy. It was like a little light went on above his head and he’s like, oh yeah, we could put in some kind of feedback. So if you did walk into a wall, you could turn it on or off.
And then he said, oh yeah, but we’re only gonna do it if our clients demand it from us. We’ve gotta prioritize our, our backlog. It’s like, oh dear. Okay. And there was one other guy at this show, which was, and it was it was this like a 3D. You got into this seat and you put straps over you and it, you flew and you had a screen in front of you and you were kind of getting jiggled about and upside down, and you were in this video game.
But I was like, so I won’t fit in that seat ’cause of my size. [00:29:00] And what about someone who’s like five foot two or something, or children? He is like, yeah, but no, it fits me. All right. Like the guy in putting. In that was in the seat was around five 11 and about 25. I knew what he was doing and it had only been designed for him.
And people sort of plus or minus a slight size difference, like much shorter people wouldn’t have been able to use it either. Like that diversity thing, you’re so, like, it’s such a good point because if you’re not involved in the conversation, you know, I think Caroline Cri Perez wrote a whole book on how the world’s designed for men and not women, and how the astronaut suits didn’t fit women because they just designed it for a standard man’s size.
And I think. I can see why sometimes I think the phrase reasonable adjustments gets weaponized and it’s seen as, oh, [00:30:00] that’s not a reasonable adjustment to make. But actually when you look at the stats, we are not talking about edge cases. This is quite a high percentage of the population that’s gonna be affected by this stuff.
And ultimately, when we’re all really busy people, what we are talking about doing makes things easier to read for everyone.
Matt: So I think it, it, those examples of, of new media I think are really interesting. ’cause one of the things that’s going through my mind is that the, the bulk of the, the media that we still use.
Even digital actually has its roots into media that are far older and come from a time when accessibility was simply just not a thing. So, you know, most documents of any sort go back to things that were produced on typewriters or similar. Most slide decks go back to things that used to be shown on 35 [00:31:00] millimeter slides or overhead projectors, spreadsheets go back essentially to Venetian.
14th century accounting practice. You know, there’s, there’s a lot of legacy that goes into these things, and there’s a bit of me thinking, well, at what point are we gonna say actually those things aren’t fit for purpose anymore because you have to make so many adjustments, reasonable or not. If only we could design media so that it could be accessible by design as opposed to accessible after the fact we’d be in a position.
And, you know, it still amazes me in many ways that we, we haven’t really got any media that doesn’t have stems back in the analog world. 30 years after the beginning of the, you know, the digital revolution in the nineties. But then you, you hear examples like that and you see things like virtual reality or the, the apple.
I think particularly the Apple AR thing, what really frustrated me about that [00:32:00] was that if you had glasses, then it was an extra $300 for the special glasses inserts. It wasn’t even that, it was an inaccessible, inherently inaccessible technology, but it was also you got charged a premium for having any accessibility issues, which is just perfect Apple, quite frankly.
But would Debbie be ways or are there examples of accessible by design media? I think one of the things that out of the box is accessible, but we don’t get taught how to use it properly, is something like Microsoft Word. Creating a Word document, but actually using the properties and the functions within Microsoft.
Matisse: So for example, using the Styles pane to create your heading structure. A lot of people don’t realize what that’s for and they see it in their top navigation and avoid it like the plague. ’cause they’re like, it’s gonna ruin my, my document, I don’t know what it is. When instead by adding that in, you’re adding the structure that and the hierarchy that’s needed in your [00:33:00] document to be easily easily navigated by anybody, especially those with disabilities who are using assistive technology.
And I find that really interesting because I wasn’t taught anything about the styles paint until I started learning about accessibility. And I was like, oh. Well, this is, this is nifty and this is handy. But also if you think from a student perspective or anybody who’s writing a long report, by adding in that structure, you’re then able to pull a table of contents in very easily.
Versus what I see a lot of people do is type in whatever the heading was supposed to be and then put period, period, period, period, period, so on and so forth, and the page number, and then try to line them up in each line, right? I’ve seen it time and time again, and when I show people the functionality of a styles paint and what it does to a table of contents, it’s like this massive aha moment.
And why had, was I not taught this when I was little? Because the software is accessible. Like they’ve given the functionality for the documents to be accessible, but without [00:34:00] people learning the actual product properly, they’re missing this opportunity to create these accessibility accessible documents.
Same goes with video. So using the example of Adobe Premier, which I use, if you’re able to create a transcript, you’re able to caption you’re able to add in your, you know, your audio descriptions if need be. If it’s post-production you’re able to add them in relatively easily if you know how to use it.
But in a lot of cases, people don’t realize the functionality of the transcript and the captions within Premier. Again, it’s not a matter of the software not providing you the opportunity to make accessible content, but rather people just don’t know because they’re not being trained or not being shown the, the software the appropriate way.
And this goes on for so many other things, social media, Instagram, people wanna post something and they, you know, an image, great, fine dandy. They can make it accessible by adding in their alternative text. However, if you’re doing it on your phone, Instagram has it hidden under [00:35:00] the advanced settings on the post, like it’s super hidden instead of it being readily available on that main.
Page where you’re adding in your caption. But if you’re using Instagram on your computer, on your desktop, it actually has the accessibility tab just underneath the caption. That makes it easily visible to say, okay, this is where I add in my alt text. So it’s also looking to the platforms themselves to add in functionality that’s easy to find.
Not just a matter of, you know, the end product being accessible, but can I find what I need to find easily so that I can make it accessible? ’cause I do have the right intentions in mind to do it. And you know, hiding something under advanced settings, nobody’s gonna look there. Nobody, everyone’s afraid to look there because you don’t wanna accidentally, you know, turn something on that you didn’t mean to, and you’re like, oh, well there goes my post.
Right. So it’s it’s, it’s still a work in progress, whether it’s the learning component or even the platforms themselves. If we’re talking social media, getting to terms with what [00:36:00] is needed from a professional communications perspective, we love bullet points. Absolutely love them. We love the formatting functionality if something needs to be bold or anything like that, but platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and you name it, don’t have that functionality in place.
So we’re seeing people trying to make do, especially with bullets, by adding emojis, right? Because they want the functionality, which now has actually made your posts more inaccessible in a sense that each emoji has its own alternative text. So it has a description built into it, so you’re hearing that description and then your actual content and then to the next description and to your content.
So while it’s trying to make it easily readable for others, because we’re adding in our quote unquote bullets we’re actually adding in a functionality that’s being more inaccessible than accessible. But at that same time, we also have to think about. The fact that what is accessible to one individual with, you know with site loss doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gonna be accessible to the next individual with site loss.
There’s a [00:37:00] great saying where the individual said, you’ve met one person with autism. Congratulations. You’ve met one person with autism. That is their, their lived experience. It’s not gonna be the same across the board. And I think that’s also something that’s important for us to consider is that.
Whether it’s the actual platforms themselves or the products themselves being accessible or not, that end user experience will come into play in terms of how accessible or usable is it to them. So we can do everything that we want to or we should be doing, but if for them, for whatever reason, it’s not usable or accessible, then we have to understand what it would take for them to have that same access.
And it might simply be a color contrast issue. It might be you know, too many emojis and it was just overwhelming. It might be spacing, it, it, there can be a variety of different things, but having that conversation as well and taking that feedback to say, okay, how do we now implement that in what we’ve created?
Whether we innately [00:38:00] made it accessible or it’s an afterthought. It, it’s something that we need to consider and really look into as well when we’re creating our, our content and, you know, using these platforms and devices to ensure that they are accessible.
Matt: I am reminded of a conversation that we had on this show many years ago now actually with Simon Minty, who’s a disability rights consultant.
Actually he is probably better known in the UK now as a national TV treasurer, but that’s another story blessing. And he talked about how you should think about what is it you are doing to be able to make your services inaccessible. Mm-hmm. And actually changing the agenda there, which is that there are conscious decisions or unconscious decisions that have been made along the way that makes things inaccessible.
Yeah. And that, that’s putting responsibility onto the service providers to be able to fix things. Yeah. Rather than the responsibility of the person with some sort of accessibility issue to try to work out a way around the problems. Well actually another conversation I had with Simon [00:39:00] not on the show, but.
As Lisa well knows, I’m, I’m a little bit obsessed with the playing card as a medium for being able to do things with, and I produced a few decks over the years now, most recent of which was a kind of tarot deck. Now had a conversation with Simon about accessibility and card decks and that’s interesting ’cause there, there are times when you I think do have to be able to make trade offs.
So a, a pack of playing cards has accessibility issues for people with dexterity challenges. It’s got issues for people who have visual issues. Now I’ve done what I can with the last couple of decks with, I’ve got digital versions of them, which can be screen read but they’re not as useful as a card deck.
But then there’s how, how do you draw those boundaries because there are sometimes surely times where you do need to make a decision about what you are going to compromise.
Lisa: I think [00:40:00] when I think of cards, something that I found from playing a lot of board games over the years, particularly again in a dark environment.
You, you go, you, you go to somebody’s house and unless they’ve got it set up as a perfect gaming table, you’re probably not got the light that you need to be able to see stuff. And it goes back to that not trying to overcrowd something with too much information. I’m just thinking of some of the terrible board game cards that I’ve played with over the years.
And like my vision when I’ve got my lenses in is, is, is great. And I’m like, I dunno what that tiny little symbol means. And there’s a thing of when you, when you start learning about game design. Actually all those symbols do mean something. They’re not just there for decoration. And I think there are ways to make cards and printed things.[00:41:00]
There are design considerations to make it better. It’s not gonna ever be perfect. You know, people have different needs. They might interpret symbols in different ways. So making sure that you have keys and guidance and if you are, if some, you shouldn’t be relying on color to tell a story. ’cause again, if you, if someone’s got one of those hue light bulbs going on, it changes the color of your card.
So which is, it’s, that’s probably one of the easiest ways to synthesize if you colorblind, is to change the color of the light around you. Does, does what you are trying to say still work? But I think going back to your question of how do you decide, I think it’s, it’s going back to that stage of reasonable adjustments, isn’t it?
If you’ve thought about it, if you’ve made, if you’ve got alternative formats available, if you’ve designed with users in mind, and especially if it’s a game, actually tested it with users and [00:42:00] play tested it to make sure it makes sense. We can only, I feel like there’s a phrase that we, we come back to sometimes about progress.
We wanna make it more accessible than it was before. We might not get to perfection, but I think trying to make things better for people is all that we can aim for.
Matt: And then one last thread to pull on. We, in the last few years have seen an explosion of new. Forms of technology that can do things like interpret images or take text, sorry, take spoken word and convert it into text or do it the other way round. Or, or, or, I’m desperately trying to have a show where I don’t talk about ai and I’m failing miserably.
But the, how’s that impacting and [00:43:00] going to impact? ’cause one of the things I can imagine will be that it becomes a get out clause for people who don’t want to put the effort in because they can say, well, they’ll be able to deal with it because of tools that they have. Are you starting to see that impacting into discussions about what’s going on with making things accessible?
Lisa: I am sure we can both talk on this, but I’ve, I saw a really interesting post recently from Leoni Watson who is blind and works in technology and she was saying that the risk of not, of having bad alt text to describe a picture is not really any worse than not having anything at all. You know, it could be a mis if, if there’s a misleading description of a jumper versus no description of a jumper.
If you’re gonna buy something on a site, is it worse to not have something? And I think it can be a starting point, [00:44:00] but I als I’ve also seen examples where if you, you know, PowerPoint will do this for you. You know, you, you can ask it to generate a description of a picture. It won’t necessarily. It won’t know your intent.
It won’t know the context. If you’ve got, imagine a picture of the Sydney Opera House alt text an ai alt text generator might know that it is the Sydney Opera House, and it could give you that description. But why have you got that picture of Sydney Opera House? What is it showing? Is it a travel blog?
And you’ve written up, you know, I was at Sydney Opera House last week and here’s a picture of Sydney Opera House. That’s fine. But if you work in an office that’s based in Sydney. It might be that you are just using that picture of Sydney Opera House to show the weather. ’cause it was a really gray and overcast day.
Or there’s been a storm, so you want to, so the description is actually, you know, it’s a really cloudy [00:45:00] day in Sydney last week. Or it might be that it’s framed from the, the botanical gardens nearby. And it’s actually, they just, the, the opera house is incidental. You are actually talking about the flowers from in front of it.
So you can use these tools to help you, but it will only be a starting point. It, it won’t get your context. And it might also exacerbate some of the equality or the, you know, we know that with all of this data that’s available, there’s a lot of biases that have built up over decades of people being biased and the lack of.
Diversity in some of these processes means that the vast quantities of data that these models have been trained or already biased, it might misgender someone in a picture if they’re not, if it’s not sure, it will just have a guess. And that’s be, it would be better to not put someone’s gender in if you don’t know.
Like it, you know, there’s lots of quirks and things that come up. [00:46:00] It doesn’t like they, I I’ve it, they don’t like we, the, if you ask the model to transcribe something or to pay something, it doesn’t like accents, non-standard spellings of things. It will make mistakes and it will sometimes completely fudge or make up things that just sound more logical because it’s not the, because it’s the more general expected next step in the series of points.
Matisse: And, and to think of, you know, I know we were trying to avoid ai, but with AI particularly, it does also have some positives to it. I know Lisa and I are always like, but human context, we need the human insight and oversight no matter what happens, particularly with image descriptions or alt text, but it can assist if you’re writing something and you’re, you’re struggling to put it into plain language or write it in active voice or shorten your [00:47:00] sentences.
It can be you know, a helper in that regard. It can help with captioning and getting you started auto captions on YouTube, for example. Now don’t leave them at the auto caption stage, like stage because there’ll be spelling, grammar mistakes. Your company name might be misspelled. So you still wanna manually go through and edit, but it’s a great starting point.
So it limits, or it reduces the amount of time required to make your content accessible because it’s there. So it, it’s. Still sort of the wild, wild west, I would say, when it comes to what does AI look like for accessibility? There’s still, there’s good, there’s, you know, not so good as Lisa mentioned as well.
But only time will tell. And no matter what, the LLM will only be as powerful or as good as we need it to be based on what we train it to be. So if we’re using it ourselves and we’re training it to really amplify and understand different accents or different spellings and that sort of thing, it [00:48:00] will get stronger with that.
But it’s something like an image description or alt text no matter what. You’ll always need that human oversight because of the context like Lisa mentioned.
Matt: [00:49:00] Fascinating as ever. Thank you both for joining us. Joining me. I’m getting very confused with this. Having one host and two guests. It’s, it’s like the old days in a weird way. Matisse looking ahead to the, actually no. The first thing, the first big question is if people want to get hold of the book, how do they get hold of the book?
Matisse: So you can order it through Kogan page, which right now we actually have a promo code to get 30% off. Through the Kogan page website.
While she is looking that up.
Matt: I’ll tell you what, we’ll, we’ll put the discount code on the website, WB 40 podcast.com.
Matisse: Perfect. Or you can get it off of Amazon or any of your local bookstores. Will be carrying it in the UK as of October 3rd and in North America come oc October 28th.
Matt: Excellent. And so, yes.
What, what have you got in the week ahead other than getting ready for your book launch?
Matisse: Launching the book next week. I’m so excited. I can’t believe [00:50:00] it’s next week. And then also I’ll be doing a really cool webinar series for the Public Relations Society of America around the Beyond Compliance, being accessible in your communications.
And just, you know, as Rihanna said, work, work, work, work, work, work. That’s, that’s the plan for next week. Brilliant. Thank you Matisse. And Lisa, other than getting ready for your book launch, what are you gonna be up to?
Lisa: Other than getting ready for our book launch. So I’m continuing work with a new client, which is kind of interesting content work.
They do things about innovation and I’m helping tie it all together. I’ve also, I can’t believe it’s that time again where the clear box software reviews have come up. So I’ve got my first demo with an intranet software provider this week. And I’ve got a bit more, I’m nearly done with the share pointing for now.
I’ve got training to deliver next week. And then the SharePoint work is hopefully parked for tech for the time being, even though I obviously [00:51:00] love and hate SharePoint. But yeah, so mine’s all also working. How about you, Matt?
Matt: So work stuff my other half is going to a long weekend with some friends of hers.
So I’ve got the weekend I’d say with both boys at one’s is going off and doing something on his own. So I’m gonna take youngest to one of my favorite places in London, which is Japan House, which is the Japanese overseas cultural thing that is in Kensington, just next to High Street Kensington Tube.
And every quarter or so they have an exhibition of something about Japanese culture. So the first one that Milo and I went to was the Japanese thing of having incredibly intricate models of food that go into the windows of restaurants. So you can see what it is that you will be. Eating in the restaurant, even though the thing is made outta glass and plastic.
And there’s a wonderful exhibit or exhibition there of how they manufacture those [00:52:00] things. It think there’s about two factories in the whole of Japan that make it all. They’re incredibly expensive. They being Japanese, put ridiculous amount of effort into making them. The most recent one was about Japanese carpent.
And the exhibition of how they go about building temples including lots of bits of wood and saws and things. And the new one is about pictograms, so Japanese diagrammatic form and how they have designed an entire design language around pictograms to be able to make signage and the like clearer.
So we’re gonna go and have a look at that.
Lisa: More accessible, if you will, well, absolutely accessible. Other Lang, I went to see the show. It’s brilliant and it’s, but it, one of the things that it came from is when you’ve got a multilingual environment, how do you have universal signs that everybody can understand?
And there’s a really cool bit in there where there was a guy saying when they first, when they first designed the pictograms for showers. They’re like, well, we didn’t really have showers in Japan, so we [00:53:00] had to ask people what they looked like. And we, we designed it off a description that someone told us about.
’cause we’d never seen one ourselves. It’s fascinating. I really enjoyed it. And like there’s some 3D bits you can get involved with. So yeah. Enjoy.
Matt: Thank you. And it’s all free as well, you had to register. ’cause sometimes it gets quite busy, but it’s as I say, I think it’s all run out of the the Japanese equivalent at the foreign office to be able to promote cultural value for Japan across the, the planet.
It’s a, yeah. Remarkable place. So that would be in the week ahead. That’d be quite good. And then getting ready for the week after to take mum to Venice to celebrate her 80th birthday, which will be delightful and I’m thoroughly looking forward to it. So that’s all good. Right. There we go. Another show done.
Matisse, thank you so much for joining us as a guest. Thank you so much for having me. This was lovely.
Lisa, thank you very much for joining us as a guest.
Matisse: Thank you.
Matt: And we will be back next week. It will be, I think, Mr. Wein and Emergency [00:54:00] what do we call him? Host of, of of last resort, Nick Drage.
Weapon of last resort. Weapon of last resort to be interviewing somebody about something. I’m not sure what, who, when, but that will be next week. And so until then, goodbye.[00:55:00] [00:56:00]
Matisse: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the internet@wbfortypodcast.com and all good podcasting platforms.