WB-40

In this engaging conversation, John Carney, a sports data and analytics practitioner, shares insights from his work in transforming sports through data. He discusses the intriguing role of randomness, revealing how probability influences outcomes like penalty shots. The talk explores the balance between data and entertainment, and how analytics might change playstyles while still relying on human decision-making. John also emphasizes the importance of contextualizing analytics within the dynamic environment of sports, proving it's not just about numbers but the stories they tell.

In this conversation, Tris Oaten, a writer and podcaster, delves into how mental patterns and environments shape creative writing more than traditional tools. He playfully critiques outdated document formats like Microsoft Word while promoting modern alternatives like Typst. Tris suggests that writer's block may actually be rooted in reader's block, highlighting that diverse consumption fuels creativity. He also discusses techniques like Bowie’s cut-up method to break established patterns and emphasizes that writing can—and should—be a joyful process.

In this episode, Chris and Nick continue discussions about the world of interim management and welcome Rebecca Fox to discuss her extensive experience across public and private sectors. Rebecca shares candid insights about the realities of interim work, emphasising that there’s no time for a hundred-day plan—it’s all about a day-one approach. She explains how interim leaders must quickly fill leadership voids, build trust, and create certainty in organisations facing strategic misalignment or transition. The conversation explores the relentless pace of modern CIO roles, the importance of commercial awareness, and why technology leaders must focus on outcomes that drive revenue, grow margins, or reduce risk rather than just managing technology for its own sake. The discussion shifts to broader challenges facing technology leaders today, including the pressures of cost optimisation in PE-backed and public companies, the increasing complexity created by SaaS proliferation, and concerns about AI adding another layer of complexity without addressing underlying process issues. Rebecca argues that organizations need to simplify before layering on AI capabilities, warning that simply bolting AI onto complicated legacy processes will create bigger problems down the road. The group discusses how AI might represent an opportunity for smaller, more agile organisations while larger companies struggle with vested interests and accumulated technical debt. Show transcript, automatically generated by Descript (so forgive errors etc). Chris: Hello and welcome to episode 3, 3 6 of WB 40, the weekly podcast with me, Chris Weston. Nick Drage. And this week Rebecca Fox. I. Well, welcome to WB 41, episode number 3, 3 6. We, we, we’ve got Nick and Rebecca, but our first day I’m gonna ask Nick, how are you doing, Nick? Long time no. See. What’s your week been like? Nick: I’m doing well. Just for the discussion I’ve been for the last week, I’ve been I’ve been vibe, coding, vibe, sorry, vibe coding, a bash script, just to run a stone, a survival game and see if, see if it’s actually gonna work. So it’s like a, it’s like a Monte Carlo simulation of the game rather than trying to play a card game like 2000 times just from the script. So that’s what I’ve been up to for the last week. Chris: Wow, that’s a whole week of trying to quite make a bash grip. Is that, is that, is that the right, is that the right tech tool for this? But isn’t AI Rebecca: also supposed to make things quite quick as well? If it’s taken a whole week to do, it isn’t, isn’t AI smashing? Nick: I, I have, Jesus, this is, this has started earlier. I have been doing other things in the last week, but that’s, that, that, that would be, that would be the highlight, but also. It’s been interesting to see how slow the process is in that. I’m like 90% of no sort of the way there with how the logic of a program should work. But still, it’s something I’ve done so regularly that I, I catch myself out and can sort of waste hours. I’m just making mistake. Rebecca: How many prompts did it get you to where you are now with this, with this bit of vibe? Oh, like like six. Okay. I think you’ve said about 600. ’cause you could have probably just written the code quicker then, right? Nick: See, well that would assume that one I know bash scripting, which I know enough to get it, like only slightly wrong. And two, I’m, I’m very much not a natural developer. Like the, the big stuff I can do quite well. The detail of make sure this punctuation is here or use spaces in this kinda line, but not that kinda line. Is, it feels like it’s designed specifically to trip me up. So that’s why it’s basically a case of asking the lille, what does this look like? Copy and paste that in, rename the variables. Take it from there. Chris: Absolutely. It is designed Nick: to, Chris: to catch you out Anyway, so but, so yeah, so we, we heard Rebecca there. So Rebecca, welcome to the podcast, Rebecca Fox Rebecca: to see you. Thank you. Thank you, thank you so much for the invitation. So last week, I, last week was actually pretty exciting. I went to an evening dinner on Tuesday. Which is great. Spon sponsored. It’s always nice to have a free dinner, which is talking about Ned how to become a ned, which I, I did a, a course on last year, but also being part of a foot C two 50 doing an NED stuff, but a really busy job that I’m currently exiting. You know, love to get a ned well and some fractional work. And then on. Thursday actually, my, my partner Hayley and I did a workshop as part of Manchester Tech Festival, which was great the first time. We’ve done a workshop together and interesting enough, we are still together after doing that workshop. So I’m very proud of us both for, for surviving. That and also well, we’ll talk about next week. And then this weekend we’re super exciting. My son’s just bought a house. My son’s 29. He’s just bought a house, so me and he went to see him and see what he’s bought and help him in able clean it and do all the little jobs that that he couldn’t do. And I’m sure there’s lots more work to do. So it’s been a really exciting and busy week last week. So yeah, it’s been great. Chris: That is a busy week and yes, you know, team handling a kind of a presentation can be a bit stressful. And Matt and I have done it actually. And you know, we we’re not, we’re not partners in that sense, but, you know, we’ve been together a long time and we’ve and we, you’re still Speaker 2: partners. Chris: We’ve never, we’ve never fallen out. You know, the, the, the, the relationship has, has, has, has remained, but yeah, that’s, that’s a difficult one. And then of course, houses so, you know, so this week for example, I. Actually my daughter came back from university. She’s only been there two, two weeks, which came back to pick something up or something. So I had that going on with you know, people going after university and, and new, new thing, new, new, new things. But I also did the UK IT leaders event in Manchester last week, which was nice because quite a lot of our Midlands tech leaders contingent were there. They made the. Arduous and app perilous journey at the M six to Manchester to to get there. And also, you know, met up with a, you know, a lot of people that I haven’t seen for a while which is always nice, isn’t it? And met a few new people as well. So, you know, new friends and new acquaintances are always welcome. So yeah, last week was pretty, pretty busy and busy work-wise as well. We, it’s one of those, it’s a funny time in business at the minute. A lot of it is a bit soft and people are struggling a bit, and again, we still talk to lots of people who are looking for work in, for CIOs or leadership type roles in it that, you know might not have been expecting to take so long to look for, look for a role. It, you know, it’s, it’s definitely. A tricky market, but it’s not dead by any means. And in terms of what we are doing, yeah, it’s, it’s busy. There’s lots of stuff going on, and I know lots of people who have exited a job and found a job really quickly as well. So I think it’s just one of those, it’s a, it’s a softish market, but yeah. Interesting stuff going on. So it was a, yeah, it. Rebecca: It was nice to see Manchester features part of it leaders as well, by the way, you know, I, I, I live in Manchester and it’s an absolutely amazing city. It Chris: is. It’s you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s got a good claim to be the, the fourth or third city in the country. And that’s you know, that’s good. You got Birmingham as the second city, obviously mean. It’s the fourth city, obviously it’s, it’s Rebecca: before London, Manchester, come Chris: on. Yeah, maybe. All right. And that I, I, I, I understand the point of view, but you know Yes. Fair enough. We, we won’t, we won’t go down. We beyond that route. But yeah, good week and I’m glad everybody’s had a good time. So what we’re gonna do is we, we’re gonna talk in a moment about interim CIO work. We had a conversation with Duncan. Stop. A couple of weeks ago about, about interim work in general. And because Rebecca is, has been a, a regular interim and even went into a current permanent role on an interim basis, and as we talked about with sometimes, sometimes that turns permanent we’re gonna talk about that and how it’s changed over the last few years and Rebecca’s experience in that. So Speaker 2: I’ll see you in a second. So then Rebecca, a fair, Chris: a fair chunk of time in interim in public sector, private sector. We talked with Duncan a few weeks, a couple of weeks ago about, about the kind of mentality of, of, of people going into interim and the kind, you know, they don’t necessarily have the time to, to sort of sit down and, and come up with a hundred day plan and all that kind of thing. How, how has you, how have, have you approached this over the years? Would you agree with that? Is it something you just sort of, you know, get in and crack on with? Rebecca: I really enjoyed that to the podcast with, with Duncan. I, I listened to it and I, I guess the one thing I didn’t do that I, I did do that Duncan doesn’t do, is he, he, I took the perm job, right? I took the perm job at NCC. I’ve been there for three months, took the perm CEO gig and I don’t regret it after four years. It was, it’s generally been a brilliant experience. You. Left it now, leaving it now. But there’s no a hundred day plan as a, as an interim you, it’s a day one plan. Right. You, your day one plan. You, you, I remember one kick, I I, I joined. It’s like there, there was a fire in the server room, you know, a server room 200 before I joined it. It’s just like, oh my goodness, what you are walking into. But what you are walking into is. Not necessarily chaos as such, but you walk into a place where people aren’t sure which direction to go in. The people aren’t sure. There’s often no strategy or the strategy doesn’t have full support of, of, of the board. You’re not going to chaos often, but you’re going into a lot of uncertainty and I think your job as an interim is to create that certainty, whether that’s strategic certainty or not, it’s about creating that certainty to give the people in the, in the technology team, whatever team you’re looking after. Some reassurance, and it’s also to make sure you’re giving confidence to the, to the board, to your boss, whoever that may be. There is no day under plan as a, as an interim. There’s just a day one plan. You, you take it from there and you are agile, your fleet of foot, you’ve got great leadership skills, you’ve got a great overview of what going on with technology, and you are very commercially aligned. I think if you do those things, you probably can’t go wrong. Chris: And we, and we, we also talked about the fact that as an interim, you’re probably going into another situation, which is. Not necessarily the happiest, either somebody’s been exited be for whatever reason. And they probably, you know, often it’s not entirely their fault. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s communication issues or trust issues that, that have happened, you know, or somebody’s left, you know precipitously. And again, that’s, that, that also may be because of the, of, of a situation in that business. And as a CIO, one of the things that you do. I have to be thinking about is strategic things. You wanna understand the business, you want us to understand the, what they’re trying to achieve as a, you know, strategically how technology plays a part in that and all of that. But when you go into that kind of situation, tactical stuff tends to be, you know, a bit like a fire in the server room, right? It’s like, what do I need to do, as you say today, one my day, one stuff. So how’s that work in terms of working? Enough with those high level stakeholders so that the strategy doesn’t flander, but also being able to pick up those sort of day to day, you know, let, let’s find out what on Earth’s going on here, things. Rebecca: Yeah, you, you, you do, you do get a little bit of, of leeway. No one’s expecting you to fix the strategy on day one, right? It, it’s that, that will never happen because they know that you haven’t, you don’t know the business, right? That’s, you know, it’s never gonna happen that way. But what they do expect you to do is fill that vacuum and that void of leadership, which clearly has pretty much 99% of the time left as someone’s left the organization, you know, fairly rapidly. You know, for whatever reason, you know, you know, typically, as you say, it’s because there’s a misalignment of, of direction probably between the CIO and, and their boss, ideally the CEO, it’s their boss, but the, some kind of misalignment or, you know, that’s, that’s what happens. And the reality is that’s okay, right? People. Don’t need to get on with each other. People do have disagreements and hopefully, you know, it’s works out really well in the end for, for that person leaving. But as a, as an interim, you’ve, you’ve gotta go in and, and fix that void. Fill that void as quickly as possible and build trust with everybody as quick as possible. And, you know, technology, yeah, it’s about technology, but fundamentally it’s all about people, right? So you get the people bit, right? Actually the technology just flows just flows behind it in my view. At some point you do have to step over and do the technology, but the people thing for me is the absolute first thing. You’ve got to get absolutely spot on. Chris: Yes. The, as you say, often that leadership part is, to be honest, I think it’s missed by a lot of people in permanent roles, incident roles anyway. So I mean, the leadership part is, is often lacking where you need to give people a kind of, okay, folks. I see, I see where, where you are. But you know, tomorrow we’re gonna be here and the next day we’re gonna be here and we’re going to get to a point where we can start to make some different decisions. And giving people that kind of, I guess, confidence that you are gonna be able to achieve some of those things. That, that to me is, is really important. That word, that leadership word. I think we don’t use it enough, if I’m honest. I, I, Rebecca: I don’t think we do. And I, and I, I, I do, I do see and feel it changing. But the, the reality is, is, is for far too long, by the way, and I’m, I’m, I’m a massive believer that that technology leaders or whatever domain you work in, whether it’s finance or marketing or wherever it is in the organization, does need someone in that leadership position to have, I’m not saying exclusively come up through the ranks, but do actually have some technical understanding, whatever discipline that was for you to lead that function. I, I, I, you know, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve worked with people, you know, above me when I was younger who didn’t have that technical discipline, and they don’t fully get the picture. I think it’s absolutely essential. You do get it, but then of course you then still also learn those leadership and those people skills that, you know, sometimes is lacking in people with, with technical backgrounds, right? Of any technical background, whether it’s finance or marketing. Some people aren’t, aren’t leaders, but I think it’s absolutely essential to. Understand the, the basics and then then be a leader on top. I think if you’re a leader first and then technical second, I don’t really think that works. And I, I don’t really think that works really when you go into an interim role, especially because you do have to not panic about the technology, focus on the people first, then focus on the technology. And I also think that, you know, we, we, we talk about perm roles and we talk about. Now the, the pace of change that we go through right now in, in, in the, in the business world. Yeah. The, the economy kind of feels a little bit soft. It does feel rather relentless every day. And I, and I do think often the expectations of a PERM employee now seems pretty similar actually, to an interim. People are expected to deliver quickly, respond quicker than ever. You know, maybe it’s not quite the relentlessness of an interim, but people do need to react with urgency and pace. And actually when they don’t actually, maybe that’s why they’re exited. And when interim’s brought in, right? Chris: Yeah. But Rebecca: to do, yeah, Chris: I, I get that. Absolutely. And I think, you know, the, the, the, the days of people working for companies for 10, 15 years, you know, are, are rarer and rarer. But when you’re an interim, one of the things that you are definitely doing or you should be doing, you know, or I say I should be doing one of the things that will be on your mind. Is how do I, how do I exit? You know, how do I leave this in a situation where I can be replaced? Whereas if you’re going into a role that’s permanent, that’s probably not, you know, the, the first thing on your mind and, and probably shouldn’t be because you’ve got, we need to have a slightly longer yeah. View of that. Would you, would you agree with that? Rebecca: No, I, I, I definitely, I definitely agree. The, the one, the one thing I, I probably would disagree on is I think, you know, doing a, doing a CXO XO role is exhausting, right? Sometimes you do need to have a break in your career, and I think, I think there’s, I. You’ve got to go back to thinking about your health and wellbeing and actually no. Do doing a, a role of that level for any period of time takes a big chunk out of it. Yeah. You may get greater salary, that’s brilliant. And some Mel tips, but it is quite exhausting. Right. And actually, how do you. Maintain that year after year, after year, after year after year. I know four years of doing group CEO for a FSE two 50 is exhausting. And I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the last few months of I’ve been on gardening leave and that it’s been great. And I, you know, I’m, I, I, you know, took a bold, brave decision that I didn’t wanna be there. Anymore. Not because I didn’t enjoy what I was doing or the people I worked with, but you know, sometimes you just need a God break. Sorry. Goodness. Break whatever you wanna cross out that, by the way. Edit that out. Thanks. I think our, our, Chris: our listeners won’t be coaching their pearls at Rebecca: that. You, you just, you just need to give yourself a break. And, and I’ve certainly learned that in terms of, you know, looking after myself, you know, you’ve got to look after your mental health. You’ve gotta look after your physical health. ’cause if you can’t, you can’t perform at your best. You can’t perform at your main game. You know, and you need to do that. If you’re not doing that at a, at a, at a, at a CXO level, whatever that is, C-T-O-C-I-O-C-M-O-C-P-O, whatever it is, CDO, you’re not doing the best you can, right. You’ve gotta factor that into your career, I think. And, and, you know, interim is, you know, no different, right? You, you factor in a, in a break because it definitely is more relentless when you’re doing interim. ‘Cause you’ve gotta be absolutely on it. You maybe got a little bit of a leeway as a per rail, but I don’t think there’s that much difference now in the, in the, in the organization’s requirements of what’s needed from a CIO you know, technology and data underpins every single organization. If I think about. What has changed in the last 10 years Without technology and data, every single organization would not exist pretty much. And actually that has changed the pace of that usage is there. Chris: Yeah, I used to say that once upon a time. I’d say that, you know, when I started my career and even quite the way through it you could lose your compute systems for a couple of days, and as long as their business isn’t. Like, like completely white collar, you know, working in engineering and manufacturing, things like that. You know, you, you, you, you could get away with it. It wasn’t good, but you could, you could recover. Whereas now it’s essentially, you know, death if you, if you do that and j lr and, and Rebecca: we see. Okay. So we see every day with, with with cybersecurity. Right. You know, and, you know, that is raised at the agenda because you know, it, and technology is, is so fundamental to every single organization, you know, even when it isn’t the core business. Right. And it’s never been like that more now than ev you know, literally 10 years ago it was kind of there, but it wasn’t. But now it absolutely is. We should be running the show, right. As CIOs. That’s what I think. Too far. Chris: No, I don’t think it’s too far. I, I think rather you, than me, frankly. There’s, there’s a, there’s a reason why I don’t even do a CIO role anymore. Right. There’s, there’s, as you say, sometimes you just have to say, you know, I don’t wanna do that anymore. But you’re right. I mean, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of good skills out there and a lot of, you know, the CIO is, I always say you TIO role, technology roles generally are the best role roles in the company, right? You get to see across the whole company. You get pretty well paid compared to everybody else. You get to play with cool technology and, and talk to cool people, right? People just stop complaining. I dunno whether you agree with that. Nick. Nick: Interest, interesting points made lot of thoughts of that in that technology and data is the foundation for everything. Ah. But also the, the half thought I had is ’cause it’s so ubiquitous, it’s therefore not that special. It’s just something else that should be relatively dependable and relatively automated. Like finance, like power, like, like little electricity, is that kind of thing should be at the stage where you don’t need a specific person in the C-suite. To manage it. I mean, I dunno whether this will go down well or badly with you too, but I often think that what the, what the C-suite should be doing a lot is off on golf courses, playing golf, thinking, waiting for ideas to come up rather like you’ve, you’ve said sort of specifically Rebecca, sort of being on it immediately when actually I think at that level you should have a lot more free time for a lot more. Strategic thought and the people beneath you should be the ones that can do that. That feels, that feels sort of as a, that that feels like a problem, but that’s only a half considered thought, so I dunno what the answer is. I’m hoping shut it up and handing over to you. You are gonna give me the answer to my half considered thought. Well. Rebecca: First of all, I don’t play golf, so that wouldn’t be a, wouldn’t be an option for me, but, but what I would say, I think maybe that is the case or was the case a few years ago, right when the economy wasn’t as tight, when people weren’t constantly doing cost out programs. You know, you know, I think that probably was the case and it felt like we had more time to to, to do those things. And think the reality is, is, is twofold. First of all, the economy doesn’t allow that to happen. Everything is really tight on cost. Whatever organization you work in, whether it’s cash rich or not, it’s all about cost and ebitda. Simple as that. And, and I think that’s just what’s expected of, whether it’s in the Foote or PE or obviously that’s just what’s expected. So I don’t, I don’t think there’s often that time for that extra, extra bits, which is maybe the, the golf thing a couple of days a week. The other thing is, if we go back to technology, and I’m gonna compare technology to finance, right? I don’t think the basic principles of accounting and finance have changed that much in the last a hundred years. We’re fully to get a CFO on here. Nick and Chris, just to validate that, but when I spoke to a finance person a couple weeks ago, I said, Rebecca, you know that, you know, the, the, the, the, the basic principles of finance haven’t changed. You can argue the basic principles of technology haven’t changed the last, you know, a hundred years either. But, but the reality is they have moved at a much more significant pace and increasingly do so. And based on the last comment that all businesses now are built on data and technology, we haven’t got time. We literally have got to keep ahead of the game, ahead of the curve more than ever before. And we haven’t properly mentioned AI in this conversation. I think, I think that’s the first time mentioning AI in this podcast. But you know, that only just accelerates stuff, right? You know, it, it is just relentless and that’s making the business relentless. And I would even say that AI is probably the one bit of technology that has come around, certainly in my lifetime. That genuinely puts the power in the hands of the business. Whether it’s used or wisely or not, I don’t know. But it genuinely will put the how hands of the power in the business and possibly circumnavigate it to some extent. But actually if it does, it does it at its peril. Because actually we all know that AI is built on data. We know that ai, you know, is inherently probably insecure. And actually, if it doesn’t have some oversight and expertise coming from the people in the technology and the data function, then we can have a bigger mess in what we often feel like we have now in technology functions. It’s just we have so much complexity, partly down to SaaS, partly down to other things too. Probably lack of leadership from, from ai, from from IT leaders. You know, AI is gonna. Feel like it’s chaos, right. Chris: I think, yeah, I think that’s, that’s a good point. Alright. I, I’m gonna indulge myself for a moment now. Going back to the point you made about finance not changing and technology changing quickly, I wonder, so, no. Yeah. I mean, finance hasn’t changed. Obviously. There’s, there’s still, nobody’s gonna keep their ledgers and, you know, you sell things and you buy things. You mentioned ebitda, and I think that is a measure that has become important in the last 20 years. I don’t remember people talking about EBITDA back in my earlier days. Maybe Rebecca: they’re right. Chris: And the reason that people talk about EBITDA is partly because so many companies are now pe, PE owned, and the reason they’re doing cost and all the time is because they’re passing, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re flipping the company every few years that they, you know, they’re taking there. They’re biting into the neck, they’re draining out as much blood as they can, and then they pass it onto the next one until, until the, the, you know, lifeless Huss gets thrown on the on the scrappy Right. And the checker takes all the pain. So what’s, is Rebecca: that part of the check you think? Just a quick cut. It’s a bit like pass the parcel. Right. But you don’t wanna be the last one to have the parcel. Right. There is no private end. Right. It’s got chairs. Yeah. Yeah, it’s musical jazz. I think, I think it, I think possibly is right, and whether it’s, whether you, you’re working for a fse, a public listed company, or whether you’re working for a pe I think it is, right? I think there’s more pressure on everybody. You know, as much as we, we, you know, we, we all have ESG targets. Absolutely. I think that’s a really important thing to do. But certainly when the economy is tight, it is all about ebit, right? There is no. There is no fun and there is no joy. Sometimes it literally is just relentless, what’s right for the business. Chris: Yeah. And, and sometimes that gets in the way of thinking about what’s right for the customer. Right? And why, why are we even here? Because are we here to serve the customer and or are we here to return value to to shareholders? Well, I would say the two things going hand, hand in hand, but. The. Rebecca: I, I think, I think it depends on where we are with the economic cycle, right? And whether it’s a cycle of seven years, 10 years, whatever we, we agree on right now, that cycle feels like it’s a a stagnant cycle. Whether is, is is little growth or growth that’s not really catching up with you know, inflation and, you know, just feel like that. And that’s on the back of COVID and or whether it is COVID or whether it’s on the back of the financial crisis in 2007. I. Got to be really, really mindful of stuff and yeah, you do see some organizations that are. Throwing more cash around than, than before. But also COVID has changed how we work, right? We’ve got a whole lot of real estate that isn’t, isn’t filled. So how do we now, how do we even justify that, right? Having offices that people aren’t in every day or not in on a, on a Monday and a Friday, and there’s loads of stuff that we just don’t know any, this big economic thing. What I would say is A, as an IT leader, if this is you listening, is you’ve gotta be much more commercially aware If you don’t think you are. ’cause your job isn’t just data and technology. Your job is business. Your job is understanding commerciality and the direct impact that you have running your function, turning those binary naughts and wands and your data and your AI and your technology into sound commercial outcomes based on, you know, driving revenue, growing margins, or reducing risk. And if you are doing something that doesn’t impact one of those levers, you’re in the wrong job. Chris: Oh, that’s a good point. And, and I, and, i’ll come away from that. You, you, you press one of my buttons and I end up, I end up, oh. Which, which button Rebecca: did I press? Chris: Chris, come on. Yeah, come on Chris. Mention and, and I and yeah, I mean, I’ve seen too far, too many times I’ve seen, you know, people lose focus on what it means to be in business at all. What is the point of being a, of here? What are we doing for our customer? But no, I actually, I think what you said there, that brings us back to you. The, the, the thing we must always mention nowadays, which is AI and how lots of businesses suddenly want, you know, they, they, they’ve got, there’s a bit of a, oh my word, this is it. And agent ai and all of these things, they will say, we will reduce our back office functions. They will mean that we’re gonna be lean and mean and we’re gonna be automated and everything’s gonna be there. It’s not. I, no, I take issue with, with that. I don’t actually think that’s the best use of the technology personally. I, you know, I think it’s better to add value than to re What, Rebecca: what do you think the best use of the technology is? Nick? Chris: Really? Yeah. No. Well, so you don’t let, let. Nick: Yeah, let, let me jump in. ’cause I think that’s a, a really key point in that, especially with record. As you said earlier, the technology is fundamentally insecure, which I think it is in multiple ways and like, like arguably it’s frac, argu, arguably it’s fractally insecure. Like, would you ever level, you look at it, there’s a problem, and if you zoom out or zoom in, there’s still problems. I think it does. Amazing things as per, before we start the recording, sort of, you know, is it, is, can it be a colleague? I think in a way it can, the way the whole, the whole I am, I am laughing at the thumbs down. I’m being given by Rebecca For the audience At home or on your jogging or at work or whatever. Yeah. A colleague, never a colleague. No, I th I, I think with the whole second brain idea, like you said, about life and business becoming more stressful and faster, the number of people who are depending on. Sort of external facilities more than just sort of, I’ll, I’ll keep a notebook sort of thing. The whole settle cast idea and so on. I think LLMs figure into that and you can, there’s, there’s something about talking to something else that talks back. It’s not like as per rubber duck programming and so on, there’s, there’s something about that, that LLMs are capable of now that computers weren’t before. So I think there’s something here. I don’t think it’s worth the investment and. Let me sort of brush over and say the, the, the penalties it’s incurring. And also, like Chris was just saying, I think there’s a lot of functionality where it’s being forced in and you’re like, this is, this is the wrong kind of computing being used for that. You are, you are, you should be looking for something, some kind of simpler automation rather than it feels like it’s a GI because it talks back to you and. And just because it feels that way doesn’t mean it’s actually useful that way, is what I would say in answer to that question. Chris: Yeah. And the, the only point I would make on the, on the on the, what’s it good for is that it, it’s being seen as a way to cut costs right now. And I think it’s much better adding value and, and making, and making you more, you know, so for your pound, you can add more value to your customer through your value chain. Than you could before. I don’t think it’s very good at cutting costs. I think there are cost cutting elements, but, but at the moment, because you can’t give it decisions to make really of any importance, it’s more of a, it’s more of a multiplier and a value add that, you know, help you do a better job for the same cost and the same effort than you could before, I think. But Rebecca, I’m, I’m keen to hear Rebecca: your view. Hmm. Well see, I, I think it goes back to this thing, right? We, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve gone through this, this SAS phase, haven’t we? Where we’ve ripped out all our, our things that we could just sweat the assets on our ERPs, our CRM, and we’ve, we’ve now put all these swanky. SaaS products, you know, that, to be fair, like some of them are 15 years old and they’re still looking as cranky as the on-prem stuff. Right? And the difference between that and and on-prem stuff of many years ago is you have to keep paying for them every month. Right? And yet, and we’re just not getting the value. And I think your point Chris, about the value chain is absolutely crucial. Understanding your flow of. You know, the flow of process of how you create a business, how your business runs for value chain is absolutely essential. And I think a lot of those have got very complicated. Partly because of underpinning technology has got more complicated. We just bolted more stuff on SAS hasn’t helped. And I think now what we’re gonna go into this thing is we haven’t fixed those processes. We’re now just gonna put this magic bullet of AI on top, which is gonna lay another lot of complexity on there. It’s gonna be hard, right? For, for anybody in technology leadership to say, no, we’re not gonna do that With all the hype that goes around it, but also knowing it’s gonna be a quick fix, potentially. Right? And the reality is, the only fix to this really is to simplify the whole lot. Just strip it back to its bare bones, and then maybe layer some AI on it. But if you’ve just got a complex problem that needs to be simplified and you’re just making it more complicated. Yeah, it might fix it temporarily, but you know what? In five, 10 years time, you’d be paying for your SaaS product and you’d be paying for your AI on top, and your data will be in a worse place. It needs big, brave decisions for people to go, actually, let’s just stop and let’s just break this thing apart. Make it simpler. No, not start again, but just start driving value out of the SaaS products, which invariably have AI plugged into them and drive it that way. I don’t think we’ve got time to do that. Like I said, it’s like moving a relentless place. Does anyone have time now to do a two year transformation project or a one year transformation project? Do ever those do ev Do they ever get finished? I don’t know. Chris, I don’t blame you for not doing a CIO job at all. They’re bloody hard and you’ve gotta drive influence and, and all that kind of, it’s just that hard, right? And the reality is, is who everyone’s gonna blame. They’re gonna blame the it, right? Because that’s what we all do. Nick: That’s a really, I give Chris a chance to think some, that’s a, that’s a really good point about from on-prem to SaaS generally and how that has arguably been mismanaged from my own point of view in the. People have like taken on-prem and just picked it up and put it down in a data center or someone else’s data center or a bunch of virtual services. When, to me, looking at that from a relatively technical point of view was always, oh, there’s, there’s a whole new set of things you can do. There’s a whole set of limits that don’t apply anymore. IE. You know, just, just the obvious physical limits aren’t there anymore with regard to networking and compute and whatever. But so many organizations didn’t take that opportunity. So if you do that, but now add LLMs, which are going to be doing the same, are gonna be sort of slotted into the same bad processes thinking they’ll it just, it just sounds I’m far less optimistic. Now than I was sort of half an hour ago in this conversation. I’m so sorry, Nick. No, no, but no, but it also, what was, what I wanted to sort of jump in and ask was, do you think this is an opportunity for organizations who are brave enough to make those kind of choices? Because it feels like a lot of organizations will fail. Sort of slowly, but they’ll fail because they’ll keep doing the same kind of standard approach of piecemeal long-term transformations that don’t work. I, Rebecca: I think, I think two, I think two things here, right? First of all, do I think they’ll fail fairly? I, I think two org some organizations wrote fail. I just throw cash. You do. Although just. Type things off, or they’ll just, they’ll opt, they’ll have to optimize. Right? That’s what will, that’s what will happen. But it, I mean, they’re not properly driving Chris’s favorite ebitda, right? They’ll be, they’ll be missing a, they’ll be missing a trick. They won’t be doing strategic, they’ll be doing tactical stuff. I think there’s a real opportunity here for, for smaller organizations that are more agile, that haven’t created this spaghetti mess of stuff to, to really shine. I think IA ai, ia AI get, we get two letters in the right way around. What am I doing? I, I, I think AI will be a real opportunity because it’s. It’s a way for people to get that intelligence on tap. Right? By the way, I think Microsoft coined that phrase, but I’m gonna steal it from the right. That intelligence on tap, you know, into an organization that really wasn’t possible for organizations of a smaller scale than some of the larger ones, right? So I think that’s really gonna be a, a thing that’s smaller organizations can leverage more than larger organizations, but. I, I, I do think it’s, it’s gonna be a real problem unless you pair back and simplify your processes. AI is just gonna make them more complicated and you’re just kicking that can down the road, which all of us on this podcast have seen many, many times before, right? People not making the right decisions in time, A, because of cost, B, because of impact, or, or c, because of whatever it is. But it is about being bold and brave. And if you’re not being bold and brave with how you tackle, how to implement ai. Then I do think you’re just storing up problems for the future. And maybe that’s why people don’t stay in their jobs for 15 years anymore, Chris. ’cause they just don’t, don’t wanna leave the mess. And that’s what interims have to come in and clear it up or at least kind of put a, a, a, you know, polish your head on it. Maybe. I don’t know. I was Chris: I was talking to somebody about this the other day actually, and they were talking to me about, you know, oh, you know, is, it is really gonna turn, you know, businesses upside down so that you know, the, the business that you are in now will work completely differently because of ai. And I’m, and, and my take on it is, well, maybe but unlikely because actually the people, there’s too many people with a vested interest in it staying the way it is, more or less, you know, it’s paying their pensions. It’s, you know, they, they, they’ve got a team of people under them, which means that they have to get paid a certain salary to stay at the top of that particular pyramid. And if you end up with turning upside down because of ai. That all goes away. Right? So the, so the a, the, the vested interests in, in large companies means that they will probably stay the same. And as you say, it will be the smaller companies, it will be the younger companies and the, and the businesses that, that step in to the gap with the failed businesses have been. That, you know, will be an evolution that way and, and therefore it won’t be in the next five years, it’ll be in the next 15 years, 20 years probably. Rebecca: And, and there’ll be something else other than AI that we’ll be talking about, right? Whether there be, there’ll be another technology that we, you know, may maybe general ai general artificial intelligence would’ve, would’ve, would’ve emerged then. And generally, maybe they can be our colleagues at that point, right? And to be fair, maybe it can thick all the problems that the humans of course, right now, right. Maybe I’ll tell you what I do think will be an interesting technology, and, and if I, if I think back about a technology and I think about. You know, can I, can I name softwares? Like sa Well I’ve now named Salesforce Dynamics, all those tools, right? I think they’re in a really tricky place right now, right? Because they’re very structured bits of, of software, right? They, they do some error, a function. And what’s great about them at the moment, which you can lift upon it, we can see what they do. We can see the logic in them. Just like when you write code, you can see the logic or somebody can some software engineer can tell the logic. What I’d love to see happen with AI is if AI. Just replaces all those applications, all the application layer, and has a very dynamic way of building and creating stuff. So actually maybe Nick can divide coding with six lines of code about how to, how to do some amazing p and l in finance, or how to do some amazing marketing thing or, or some sales activity. But you just. Stick AI on a load of data, but the AI also produces a business logic. Now, just imagine how amazing that would be when you want then wanna do a, a business transformation. You don’t have to go through all those cycles of actually, you know, doing the code testing, the code. AI would just handle that for you. And that blows my mind. But I also know thinking about vested interest is, what does that mean for those players like Microsoft, like Salesforce, you know, like all the others. That have built that logic into that code, when actually, if you’re just building ai, just letting AI do that, I think that’d be really interesting. And I’d like to see the first AI ERP or the AI CRM, that’s not actually an ERP or him, it’s just AI logic. Yeah, there’s an ai, Chris: there’s a kind of Benedict Evans. Evan, is that his name? Somebody he, he he does a, a thing every year about his predictions and, and last year he was talking about, or the start of this year talking about you’ve got these two camps really. You’ve got your, you’ve got your AI pragmatists and your ai maximalist and the pragmatist think that the AI is a component of an existing type of system. Your ISTs think that the AI will become the system. Then you have components that, that, that the AI calls, but as you, to your point, Rebecca could write it could say, ah, now I need a thing to do that I’m gonna write the software, I’m gonna run it, and then I’m gonna start, and then I might delete it. Right? Or I might keep it for next time, because I think it’s important that we have a consistent process there. But there’s a, there are, there are definitely two schools of thought and where, where that’s going. Rebecca: If we, if we had the AI as being the, the, the, the systems architect, this is getting a bit kind of sky fi now. Right. But that was the thing. And I, and I do think we’ll get there, def I definitely think we’ll get there. I’m sure people are developing this stuff, but it, it’s just like, you know, as a small business. Right. And I’m restarting my, my, my consultancy. But the reality is I’m the brain of that. But in reality, you know, I, I do the CRM, do the EIP, do the finance. I guess they use my tools to do it, but actually as it grows, maybe I could just replace me with an AI that does all that stuff and because it would be much faster and probably much more, I’d be much more intelligent than I am. It could just do it much more faster, much more dynamically. Wouldn’t that be great? Nick: Ish Rebecca: on Nick. Great. Ish. Nick: Ish. That wa as in I’m, I’m struck by your in to, to an, to answer what seems to be a relatively throwaway point. Far too seriously. I’m struck by your insight and experience, but that whole idea of you tell something that interprets what you want, then that thing goes and deals with the tools. To me. Yeah, it sounds, I, I dunno if it’s possible, but to me that sounds ideal. And, you know, the whole point of all, all of this to turn ideas into things, to turn ideas into actions. Going back to your point about sort of leadership, that’s what leaders do is get people to turn their desires at work, to turn that into products or services or helping customers or whatever. Being able to do that, that efficiently. Sounds so enticing, but I’m really, I’m really not sure if it’s possible. The technology seems so. Potentially disastrous at the moment. I mean, it’s, it’s all, it’s all, it’s all really exciting, but the, the sort of cone of possibilities is so wide right now. Well, for what, Rebecca: how this Nick: all Rebecca: might turn out in 2025. Right. I mean, the enticing sounds really good. Right. Let’s be really clear. Like the world around us is burning, so, and it genuinely does feel like, yeah, you look, you know, just, I, I do not wanna open the newspaper in the morning to to hear what someone else has said or what other. Disasters happen, natural disaster, poly related climate change, or what the disaster human created has happened. Right. And it, and it, you know, may, maybe we need a bit of hope. Right? Maybe we need a bit of positivity to, to look forward to right now. Chris: Yeah. And it depends, it depends on which side of the fence you stand, whether, whether the AI Maximus view is hope or it’s or it’s the other one. But but no, it’s, it, it is fascinating, right? And, and this is our, I’ll tell you what, this is a really interesting subject and we could talk, talk about it for another hour. No doubt. We probably need to just cap it. But what I would like to hear just before we finish Rebecca, is because you are. You are exiting your current position. You, you know, you, you, you’ve taken some time and you’re gonna do something else. You are starting up your own consultancy or restarting it. Rebecca: I, I’m restarting, I’m reigniting lenika as, as I would describe it. So it’s, it’s the business I, I started when I did my interim work. I never, I never shut it down. I. I guess I’ve got COVID to, to end, you know, to say I had a couple of people running through it before COVID. Obviously COVID didn’t happen there and that’s probably why I took the perm job at NC. Not just ’cause it was an amazing organization too, but I just thought, you know, keep the risk down. And then there was a time more recently to be bold and brave, right? And it’s just like, now’s that time. So yeah, that’s that’s exactly what I’m doing. Somebody may come along and offer an amazing perm job. Possibly not after this podcast though, Chris and Nick, but you know, you’ll never know. But for now. Full steam ahead, focus on mea and we’ll see where that takes it. Right. You know, I’d possibly love to do some interim work as, as well, or certainly some fractional work. That’s certainly the, the place I’d like to be. And that was certainly talked about on, on previous podcasts, but, you know, it’ll be a mix and match, you know, and as I, as I enter the twilight decade of my career yeah, I’m, I’m quite looking forward to seeing what that looks like. You, I, I certainly. I do not worry about my future. Do you worry about the future of the human race? Yeah, probably. Right? You know, Arnold Schwartz think is just around the corner with, with his Terminator Act, possibly. I don’t know. Speaker 2: Well, thank you for that Chris: Rebecca. Another fascinating conversation and really one that I’ll be thinking about for some, quite some time respect. What we. Need to move on and we need to wrap up this episode of WB 40. And how do we do that? We always do it by talking about what we’re getting up to. So Nick, what’s your week look like? Nick: Ah the, the less exciting thing is basically I’ve was scribbling down there. Oh, thanks. It’s like some admin rubbish is basically what I’ve written. Some sort of accountant related stuff. But the other thing is, what I might have mentioned on here before is. A what I might start calling an ongoing dynamic exercise or an o an ODE, which is basically a serious game. Played over a series of turns of indeterminate length rather than you get everybody together for the same day. Everybody’s in the same room. Thinking about a thing is how to do that online, how to do that remotely, how to do that asynchronously. There’s an idea. I’ve been home for an age that I’m finally, I finally got some time to work on. For the rest, the rest of the week, so that’s fine. Br Chris: that’s al. Thank look. Rebecca: Well tomorrow I am, I’m joining Haley again to do a talk at Manchester Manchester Festivals Women in Technology Day. We’re gonna be talking about breaking down the fortress to get into tech on Wednesday am Downey London on a panel for ice, which is the International Cyber Expo. And then on Thursday, it honestly, it’s a packed week. I mean, Leeds, it’s like the amount of miles I’ve be clocking up around the uk. On a panel as part of Manchester, not Manchester Le Digital Festival. I’m on a panel talking about m and a and tech due diligence, which don’t quite that right before. And then maybe Friday, I’ll congratulations. I think that’s, that’s a fine Chris: way to end the week. So I this, this week actually is quite a bit like you, I’m trolling around, but. I think I’m, I’m in London for the next two days or maybe even three days. We’re going to an event tomorrow with a company called sibo who like a, they, they’re a bit of a sort of hosting type type company. And they’re really interesting, quite like those guys. So I’ve got an event tomorrow there and then and, and then yeah, we’re doing events and insurance assured, so in Nash Tech. So we’re doing an InsureTech event in London on. Wednesday morning with a whole bunch of people from the InsureTech UK community about agent ai. And we’ve been running, we’ve been running sessions the last few weeks on that. And we’ve got a whole bunch of people coming to that where we, where we’re gonna drill in some use cases and some of the regulatory issues with one of our legal partners. And one of our guys, Thomas, is gonna talk a bit more about the, you know, the real sort of rubber hitting in the road issues around it. So, and particularly in insurance. ’cause of course, yeah, we talk about regulated industry. How do you make sure that you you know, you do this in the right way. So that’s, that’s gonna be really interesting. So yeah, by end this week I’ll be, I end at the end of the week. I’m going to Wales walking in, in the hills for a, for a couple of days. So on Friday afternoon I should be off. So yeah, that’s my week as I, I look forward and it sounds like everybody’s got a week to look forward to. I’m you know, it’s in, in, they are different ways. I was just reflecting though, Rebecca, you’re talking about, you’re doing the. Manchester Women in tech and the digital leads Digital. And you here are on podcast talking to two old white guys, you know, with various of beard. Rebecca: That’s, that’s okay. Speaker 2: Listen, Rebecca: that diversity is about diversity, right. You know, everybody’s part of the diversity mix, right? Whether it’s two white gentlemen or whether it’s swimming or whether it’s people of color, whether it’s LGBT people, whatever, right? Diversity’s diversity. You need a bit of everyone Yeah, indeed. To make that diverse. Okay. Well thank you very much Rebecca. It’s Chris: been absolutely fascinating. And thank you to my co-host Nick. Once more, and thank you to you dear listener out there in podcast Land Listening because it’s, it wouldn’t be the same without you. See you next time. Speaker 2: Fantastic. Rebecca: Thank you for listening to WB-40. You can find us on the internet@wb40podcast.com and all good podcasting platforms.

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-9781398621848And 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.

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