U & I – Episode 1: The Accessibility Opportunity

U & I – Episode 1: The Accessibility opportunity

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Hello there. Welcome to a brand new show. Well, brand new. We’ll explain about that in a moment, but we’re calling it You and I. You and I. We’re so clever. I know. We’re very proud of ourselves. But also UI, User Interface, which is something that Piccia Neri, who’s over there, is a bit of an expert on. We had a show which we called the UI and the UX Show. We’ve been running that on and off for a long time, several years, and we were a bit sporadic with it. We’ve decided to tighten the ship up a little bit and give it a new lick of paint, a new design palette, and a new logo, which Piccia has happily put together.

It’s been months I’ve spent on

[00:01:48] Piccia Neri: that.

Really months. So long.

[00:01:50] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. I think we both know that that’s not true, but never mind. The intention of this show, really, is to introduce U. I. U. X. Concepts. We’re going to stay into all sorts of different topics over the months to come and be more regular about it, more serious about it, I guess, really is the intention. But first of all, if this is the first time that you’re seeing a show like this with me and Petra, I’m going to hand over to Picciar and just let her introduce herself. Picciar, over to you.

[00:02:21] Piccia Neri: Yes. Hello, Nathan. Hi. Thank you so much for having me yet again. It’s very nice to be here. I am a designer, mainly. I started as a book designer, which I tell you is so great. I just did a book for an artist, actually. We’ve literally done it yesterday. He was so quick and easy and nothing moves. You design something and it stays like that. You don’t have to design it five, consider all the… But apart from that, I started as a book designer a long time ago and then gradually We progressed through creative design and image making and then ended up somehow into WordPress, which is why we’re here. That’s how I started learning about how to design online, which is a completely different cattle of fish, like I said. Way more treacherous. For instance, one of the things that I considered a bit, because obviously you do consider accessibility even when you are a book designer because you need to make sure that your text is readable, you use the right type size and inks and so on, but it wasn’t a major concern. Now that I’ve been designing online for a, I guess I can say a long time, I always feel I’m new

[00:03:45] Speaker 3: to online

[00:03:46] Piccia Neri: digital design.

No, not me. I think I started around 2010. That’s 14 years ago. I have now gained considerable experience with it, and now, accessibility is my major concern. That’s who I am, really. I am a UX and UI designer. I always maintain that I do both. There are certain There are certain gatekeepers that say that you can’t be a UX and a UI designer as well. But honestly, it’s not rocket science. I started by doing interfaces because basically, if you design books and magazines and film posters, you’re creating interfaces. I can understand UX because UX is all based on research, and that’s something I’ve always done as a designer. The two things go very well together, plus accessibility, which has become my concern in the past few years. And that’s why we decided to make it the topic for this first show of the new era. Yeah. With the new name and everything and the new logo and the new colours.

[00:04:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s right.

So this is going to be our first show. I’ll just give you a hint of the things that we might cover in the future because Peeja has mapped out a bunch of different titles, and that’ll give you a flavour of what’s to come and whether or not you wish to subscribe and so on. But we’re going to be covering accessibility today, like Peeja said. Then we’ll be moving on to things like inclusion, accessibility, and usability principles. Then laws and regulations, which impact accessibility. Technology in accessibility will be another topic. Then Sustainability, which is really close to my heart. I love that subject. Accessibility audits and user testing will be another one. Design systems and accessibility, that’s a maybe, I think. Then accessibility beyond visual design and the ones that Piccia has finished mapping out for now will end with future trends in UI, UX, and accessibility. We’re not saying that’s exactly what we will do, but for now, that gives you an inkling of the things shot through with accessibility, basically.

[00:05:59] Piccia Neri: Yeah, shot through with accessibility. I wouldn’t call it. It’s probably not going to be an accessibility show per se, but it will definitely be UX and UI always from the accessibility angle, because basically, anything that I do I make that we do, we make sure that it’s as accessible as possible. Can it be perfectly accessible? No, that doesn’t exist. Why? Because we all have different needs and therefore you can address all of them at the same time, but you can accommodations.

[00:06:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we’re going to be talking about the accessibility opportunity. Would it be a good idea to share your screen at this point? Do you want me to do that?

[00:06:43] Piccia Neri: I think that we can… I’ll let you know in a minute. I don’t think quite yet. What I want to say first is explain just briefly why accessibility? Because we have said it, but Why is accessibility so essential? Because accessibility is UX, and it’s a mentality… Ux is user experience, okay? Basically, you want to give people a good experience when they land on your website, on your products, or use your products. If they can’t use it, they can’t have an experience. Well, that’s a good point. It’s a good point, isn’t it? And many more people than you think will need for you to have considered their situation. Because what we tend to do, and I definitely was and sometimes still am one of those people, even though I do my best, is that we always create something considering our point of view. It’s human, it’s normal, it’s absolutely normal. What accessibility does is it gives you a wider perspective. It makes you more open-minded. That’s why the title of this episode is the Accessibility Opportunity, because really a lot of people consider it a a pain in the rear-end because it forces you to consider many more things that you would have done than you would have done.

But the thing is that it really is an opportunity. I think that that’s the main focus of this episode is to show that. Why is accessibility an opportunity? Because first of all, accessibility is Accessibility is essential for some people. Any accessibility feature will be indispensable, essential for some people, but usually it’s useful for all. I can’t really think of any accessibility feature that doesn’t somehow benefit people who don’t have that particular disability but still find themselves using the feature. Can you think of anything that’s like that, Nathan?

[00:08:56] Nathan Wrigley: No, I was trying to trip you up there. And whilst As you were saying that, I was trying to think of something where it couldn’t be used by somebody else. And the answer is there’s probably just going to be a bit of an overlap in many cases, isn’t there? People are sometimes entirely blind, but sometimes partially sighted. I might break my arm and be unable to use my mouse in the same way that I could use yesterday. And so suddenly I stray into needing some accessibility criteria, which I didn’t before. What I’m What I wanted to say is I think it’s a bit of a spectrum, isn’t it? The idea that it’s switched on for, I don’t know, let’s say, blind people and blind people only is a bit of a misnomer. There’s so many different categories and subcategories. Like you say, if you just do your best to satisfy as many as you can, that’s probably going to reap the best results. People might stray into accessibility, stray out of it as time goes on. Yeah.

[00:09:57] Piccia Neri: Yes, that’s That’s a really good point that you’re making because, funnily enough, I was talking last week to a client who I did… They have a product, and I did an audit for them. I don’t do just accessibility audits because That’s a different guess of fish, but I do UX and UI audits that focus very much on accessibility because actually good design usually is accessible, and we’ll get to that. Anyway, they Then after my audit, they decided to rebuild all their standards, and they’ve asked me to check their standards. The first thing that I said was all of the features that you mentioned are great, but they only help blind people, which is great. But there are so many other categories that you have to bear in mind. It’s not just that. It ends up often being identified as just that, but it isn’t. I hope that over the course of the conversation, we can show that. Now, I really want to talk about what I mean with the accessibility opportunity disability. Basically, a rough estimate is that around 25% of the whole of the world population is experiencing some form of disability, whether permanent dominant or not, or temporary.

As you were saying, you could have a broken arm, or you could be the feature that is essential for some, but beneficial for all. For me, it’s with no captions.

[00:11:45] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

Okay. I

[00:11:46] Piccia Neri: can’t live without captions, and I can hear fairly well. Now, my niece is living with me at the moment, and she thinks that my TV volume is way too high, which It makes me laugh because I remember my parents being like that. However, I can hear, but I just use captions. They aid my cognition, and I use them in any language. The funny thing is that, for instance, I’m watching a French show that I love, and usually I was watching the French show with English captions. Now, the other day, I felt really brave and I put the French captions on. I felt, Oh, my God, now I’m learning so much because I’m actually not just then checking the… I’m remembering the expressions much more. Even for language, this is another example for language learn. Not only does it aid cognition, but for language learning, captions are fantastic. Or if you’re not a native speaker of any language, the captions are going to be amazing, even if you use them in the same language. So digression.

[00:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: No, not really. It’s interesting because we run a… Well, I say we, not you and I. See what I did there? I, with another person called Anshin, run a summit. I love Anshin. We get lots of comments, and we spend a lot of time making sure that our captions are correct, and we get exactly the same commentary. A lot of people just choose to have it on in the background. They can’t concentrate with noise, but they like to just glance over and see what’s going on, and they can just read what’s happening at the same time. So the idea that accessibility is an opportunity, not a limitation. In other words, you don’t have to have captions just because somebody deaf, there are other accessible… There are other people who will benefit from that option that you gave, even though they may not, in air quotes, need it.

[00:13:41] Piccia Neri: Or for instance, transcripts, which are also a… There are three levels of digital accessibility requirements, A, double A, and triple A. Triple A is hardly ever required unless you’re a specific type of organisation. But captions and transcriptions are actually A, It’s like one A. It’s like basic accessibility. But when I do a meeting, for instance, or an audit, I always transcribe it. Because even if you do a meeting and then you don’t have to do anything, you just upload it somewhere. There are so many tools that do it even for free now. I think Google Docs even does it. You transcribe it, and then if people need to remember something about the meeting, they don’t need to email you. They can just do a word search in the transcript. That’s another accessibility feature that’s incredibly useful. But let’s go back to our main topic about the accessibility opportunity. Now, Nathan, we can bring up the screen because I found one of many articles. Because actually another thing that I want to do accessibly is as much as possible, I want to make sure that whoever watches or listens to this can understand what we’re talking about, even if at that moment, for any reason, they can’t see what’s going on in the screen.

This is something that I’ve actually started doing when I do talks. When I do talks on stage at a conference, I always script my talk carefully so that if you were to listen to it without any images, you’d be absolutely fine. Nice. Sometimes, this is something, a Bad Kraus. Do you know him?

[00:15:24] Nathan Wrigley: No. I’ve met him several times. I don’t know him particularly well, but yes, Bud Krauss

[00:15:30] Piccia Neri: is great.

He’s a WordPress institution in the US, and I think he’s legally blind. He pointed that out to me. He said he produces an instructional video that has music and only images. It’s like, What do I do with that? I can’t do anything with that. Anyway, we digress a lot, don’t we, Nathan? No, it’s not. Whenever we do a show, we digress so much. This is one of the many, many articles that you can find on the return on investment of web accessibility. I do not accept cookies, actually, but it is quite nice. See, this is also an accessibility stroke. Usability feature, it’s I accept or I don’t accept or settings. Accept and don’t accept legally have to be as easy and as equally important. This is done very well. We like him already, Oliver. I actually think that this has no contrast there. We’re not going to go into this now. Oliver Ambiton just talks about the summary is done very, very well. This is also accessibility because accessibility is also about how content. We had a really long We had a conversation about this, Nathan, on the podcast that we did about typography.

[00:16:48] Nathan Wrigley: We did.

[00:16:49] Piccia Neri: It starts from content. It’s like there’s an iceberg and it’s the UI, and below the surface is all this. Look how well he’s done this. If you think that in the US, 61 million adults with disabilities, and in the UK, 14.1 million disabled people, and the number is increasing. The spanning power he talks about the UK only right now, of families with at least one disabled person in the UK is estimated at 274 billion a year. Gosh. And that’s just the UK. I know that some other point, yes, I have a free accessibility primer on my pechonari. Com website that you can find, and I think I did a research for that. The size of the disabled market globally is something as big as the China market, I think.

Something like that. Yeah, that’s just phenomenal.

It’s crazy. Why would you not want to see that as an opportunity? 71% of disabled people, and that’s also me, and I’ll show you how and where, I don’t identify as disabled, but I have disabilities, abandon websites that present access barriers. That’s normal. You just do that, don’t you? If someone shuts the door in your face, which is the equivalent, the digital equivalent, you just leave, don’t you?

[00:18:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess you

[00:18:21] Piccia Neri: would.

Almost everyone experiences temporary or situational impairments, as we were mentioning earlier, noise, poor lighting, distractions. That’s why you would need captions because if you’re on a train, you want to watch a video, so captions are my favourite thing. 97.4% of the top 1 million websites in the world have clear accessibility issues. This is a report that the WebA… This is called the WebAIM report. It’s an accessibility organisation that does a report every year. I can I’ll click and show it to you, actually. This would be nice thing to look at. It’s the top 1 million homepages based on the Tranko ranking, which combines several sources of top websites. There’s been a slight improvement from last year, but also what’s the opposite of improvement?

[00:19:28] Nathan Wrigley: Degradation.

Degradation

[00:19:33] Piccia Neri: in other things. Okay, so he had 97.8 was not quite… I thought so. So 95.9% at the moment, so this Obviously, this is the latest result. The point is, though, and I will demonstrate that in a minute, that a lot of web pages, any automated system, which is how they test this, because one million is many pages, you would have to automate the testing. The automated tools don’t actually… They only show about 30% of the issues.

Oh,

[00:20:07] Nathan Wrigley: right. Okay. Yeah.

[00:20:09] Piccia Neri: I’m going to have a sip of coffee right now. It’s a type I have a free mug.

[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice.

[00:20:16] Piccia Neri: I’ve spoken at a few Type O 3 conferences, and look.

[00:20:21] Nathan Wrigley: Mine’s the periodic table of the elements.

[00:20:24] Piccia Neri: Oh, wow. You’re so clever. No, yeah. This It’s really interesting because if you look at the most common WCAG, WCAG, WCAG, which is commonly pronounced as WCAG, are the guidelines, the Web Content Content Content Content Content Content Content Content the acronym stands for. So low contrast test text, 81%, how easy is it to sort that out? Very, very easy. Missing alternative text for images is just lazy and it’s so basic and easy to do, especially in WordPress. Missing form input labels, also really easy to sort. 48.6% of pages have that. Empty links, that’s just, again, it’s not even lazy. It’s like you forget about it, you don’t do it properly. Empty buttons as well is a common feature, a missing document language. So addressing just these few types of issues would significantly improve accessibility across the web. So accessibility, not only is it an opportunity, it’s also relatively easy to fix. You don’t even have to make it perfect because I will show you a website that shows how you can’t make it perfect for everyone. Actually, should I do that now, given that otherwise I lose the train of thought? Why not? There’s this, so blind.

Actually, I’ve got it in the other My other browser.

I’ve got it in

[00:22:01] Nathan Wrigley: the document that you’ve got open.

[00:22:03] Piccia Neri: It’s not there actually. I’ll explain what it is briefly while I get the URL. Yeah, it’s very easy. It’s blind. Hold on. It’s a search engine for… Now I’ve got… Okay. It’s a search engine for blind people, and it’s really only usable by blind people because I’ve brought this up on the page now, and page that has no clear layout, huge amount of contrast errors. If I use the automated tool, it’s got 33 contrast errors. But a blind person using a screen reader absolutely loves it because it’s conceived for them. But it wouldn’t work for someone else who uses the web, visually or in another way, because I haven’t tested it for keyboard or whatever, but it has to work for keyboard if it works for a screen reader, normally, that’s a yardstick. I find it so interesting. Actually, you could do a whole other conversation about this, but it’s such a blatant example of a website that is meant for a certain category and not for others.

Isn’t that

[00:23:13] Nathan Wrigley: interesting? Because I know. Everything about it screams from a design and just aesthetic point of view. It looks very quirky. It looks as if it was dragged out of the 1990s or something. It just goes to show that all of the bells and whistles that we’ve added since the 1990s probably haven’t helped one bit for people who are navigating the web with screen readers. That’s genuinely fascinating. Blindhelp. Net is the URL for that. If you want to go check it out.

[00:23:44] Piccia Neri: Yes, it’s very interesting. There’s a whole other topic that’s accessibility related, which is the relationship between accessibility and aesthetics and accessibility and creativity. I have a talk about that, which was at UX Copenhagen in 2023. I know that there was a talk at, I think the WordPress Accessibility Days in 2022, perhaps, about how you can create a beautiful website that’s accessible. The two things, because a lot of people I say, Yeah, if I’m accessible, I can’t be creative or I can’t do anything that’s beautiful. I think that’s really it’s a myth that can be easily debunked. I personally think that brutally This design can be beautiful. Brutalist design in web design is just literally HTML as it was meant to be, more or less. Which this blindheld project isn’t quite because it’s the colours that make it really It’s hard for me to read it. There are so many conversations that can be made about that. But to me, the point is that I’m not sure that the web is the right place for creativity. That’s something I’ve had to learn because I remember when I was starting designing websites as a designer, not as a WordPress user or as someone that had bothered understanding how the web works yet.

I had huge rouse my developer friend. She was telling me, You can’t do that. You can’t do that. I was like, What do you mean? But then he would look like, Shit, why can’t I have the typeface that I want? And I confess. I will say this now. I suggested using my favourite typeface as an image. I did this. I am confessing and we’re putting this out into the world. That was many, many, many, many years ago, though, over 20 years ago. Then I informed myself and I was like, Okay, sorry, I get that now. But a lot of designers, though, they wouldn’t do that probably these days, but they don’t inform themselves enough. You can always tell a website that was done by a creative designer

[00:26:21] Nathan Wrigley: because it’s

[00:26:21] Piccia Neri: usually unusable or inaccessible, which often is the same thing. I really I would have pulled one of those up, but it’s because we’re also improvising, aren’t we? You know what I do when I want a quick example of an unusable website that probably looks very beautiful? I go to the awards website

[00:26:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I know.

[00:26:47] Piccia Neri: It’s so easy. It’s automatic. And maybe why don’t we do that?

It’s going to be fun. It never fails. I did it live at a conference, and it literally never fails. God, I’ve got so many. I need to quit Firefox because otherwise I’ll get very, very confused. Okay, here’s the window.

[00:27:17] Nathan Wrigley: That’s it. You found it. You got it.

[00:27:19] Piccia Neri: Awards. So this is the website-

[00:27:23] Nathan Wrigley: It’s three Ws, right?

A-w-w-w-a-r-d-s. Have I got that right?

[00:27:28] Piccia Neri: Yeah. So For instance, here, they haven’t done it right, the cookies policy, because accept has centre stage, whereas reject or should be just as visible. Already, they’ve got a strip that I can’t stop at the top, and that makes me sick. A very creative website. What is it? Site. Usually when it says a very creative website, it’s the next site. There you go. Already it’s got this website is sloshcelsia. Com. I am sure that it will look amazing and super creative, but is it going to be accessible? Already, I’m trying to use this mouse. Nothing happens. Okay, I’m ready to party. Actually, for now, it’s not too bad. There’s an animation. There’s a can floating in space, and if I move the mouse around, it animates. It’s actually not too bad because I can actually stop the animation. I don’t know. If I click It’s on it.

[00:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, it’s very clever, but it’s also…

[00:28:36] Piccia Neri: No, mate, it ain’t. How do I stop this

[00:28:40] Nathan Wrigley: then?

I don’t think you do. I think you have to scroll away from it.

[00:28:43] Piccia Neri: Probably people Can you hear the music?

[00:28:46] Nathan Wrigley: No, and I’m glad.

It’s

[00:28:47] Piccia Neri: got music really loud.

[00:28:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:28:53] Piccia Neri: I can’t hear you anymore or myself.

[00:28:56] Nathan Wrigley: Get rid of this website quickly. The

[00:28:57] Piccia Neri: music was super loud.

Once again, I have proven my theory that any of the awards of the websites that win awards are hardly usable and definitely inaccessible. There was no way for me, I lost all agency. I definitely lost my sense of hearing because the music was so loud. There was nowhere for me to stop it. I find it hilarious. But was it beautiful and was it creative? Yes, we weren’t going to… I mean, the colours were beautiful, the animation was beautiful, it was really clever. But the web is something that is meant to be interacted with. We go there to find information, to complete a task. We don’t go there to be entertained, or if we do, Then it’s a different cattle of fish entirely, and then it should be in the same… Consider a medium in the same guise of a video. Sometimes I often think- You go to YouTube to be entertained.

Yeah,

[00:29:57] Nathan Wrigley: I get it.

[00:29:59] Piccia Neri: Exactly. My point being, it’s two different things. If you’re creating a website, usually it’s a tool for someone to get something done or even for you to advertise your product. But you’ve sent me away, so you haven’t really advertised it because I had to run away from that website. Not quite. Back to accessibility as an opportunity. We were on that website that I think we lost it because we went, it’s here. There you go, you were there. You were there, lost it. That’s it. We could go into more detail with that, but really just trust the numbers. It’s a huge market. You’ve got that, and I always lead with that. But I now also have to add that in Europe, there’s already the European Accessibility Act that will come into full force. It will be enforceable as of the 28th of June, 2025. That act makes you liable, even if you’re not a public organisation or if you’re just a business. I think only microbusinesses are We did. So microbusiness, I think, is below… But don’t take my word for it. I am preparing on it, though, because I am speaking at Hatch conference in Berlin in early September talking about this.

But the point that I’m going to make at that Because in the first place, it’s like, yes, you need to be aware of the legal implications. But why would you want to be a dick in the first place? Because also a lot of the WCA guidelines… I mean, let’s say, even if you are legally compliant and implement all of the WCA guidelines, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are accessible because the WCA guidelines do not cover everything. There’s lots of stuff that they don’t cover. Trust me and trust the numbers and start thinking of accessibility as an opportunity. What’s one of the companies that makes more money in the entire world, Nathan?

[00:32:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Apple.

[00:32:07] Piccia Neri: There you go. Of course, it’s Apple. Apple is a really good example. This article is actually hilarious, and I’m about to show you. Apple is a really good example of a company that has invested a lot into accessibility. Do they make money? Yes. Yes, they do. They It’s making a lot of money. So is accessibility profitable? Well, clearly it is. Now, this site, hilarious, is called The Verge, and their manager data that comes up is evil because it forces me to manually talk I go off all the cookies that I don’t want, all the stuff that I don’t want, I’m forced to manually turn it off, which is evil. Do not ever do that, please. Usually, I would just move on, just not do this. Finally, five minutes later, I’ve… No, there you go. Now, confirmed choices. Now, this article is about the new accessibility features from Apple that let you control an iPhone or an iPad with your eyes, which is amazing. And funny enough, it talks about, look at the URL, it mentions motion sickness accessibility features. Now, I have vestibular disorder. Any animation that I can’t stop, such as the GIF that is now on the top of the page and lower down, even if I try and move away from it, I’ve got two now.

Any animation that I can’t stop, I am literally already sick, and I’m not even exaggerating. I cannot be on this page. I have to move down. That’s hilarious. I find it hilarious. But anyway, this is a A very recent article. Today is we’re recording early June 2024, and this is May 15th, 2024. If you do any research, there are so many features that Apple has that are accessible. Let’s start from voiceover, which is a screen reader that’s built into the Apple iOS that tells you exactly what’s happening on the device. You know what’s on the screen, you can select the commands. Then they have a magnifier that uses the camera and it increases the size of anything that you point at. Even if you’re trying to read the evil labels in a supermarket that you can’t read, you can use that. It’s actually augmented reality. That’s a wonderful feature. Theory and dictation, sound recognition, I mean, that works even too well because I’ve sometimes used it. We were earlier, Nathan, how we speak by ourselves. I do that a lot.

[00:35:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do.

[00:35:05] Piccia Neri: Responding to me, I’m like, No, I wasn’t talking to you. But Google as well has done a lot. I remember when my dad, he was 90 when he died, and he was doing all his research on his ailment, and he would just… You would know, he’d be like, Okay, Google. At the time, the command of an Android phone would be, Okay, Google. He’d just have long conversations with Google and finding out everything that he needed to find out. It was amazing. He was just like… It’s an accessibility feature, but he wasn’t there for it. He had all his faculties and he could have… But that’s the way he preferred to interact with the web.

[00:35:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, nice.

[00:35:55] Piccia Neri: That’s another accessibility feature because Google also does a lot. Now, what I want to address is that maybe people listening to this or watching it may be thinking, Well, these companies have a lot of money. Of course, they can do this. But my point is, and I think we showed it earlier when we were looking at the web million main errors, it doesn’t cost that much to start on the right foot. You know what What do you need to do, Nathan, to start on right foot? Where did you start from?

I don’t actually know.

You do, but I’ll remind you, is you start from HTML structure.

Oh, sorry. Yes, get the dom, right.

The brutal is design. If you get the HTML structure correctly, then everything else is going to become so much easier and You will have an accessible structure for your website. When I say start from content or start from typography, that’s what I mean. I’m soon doing a masterclass in that because I really firmly believe that if you get started from typography, everything about accessibility will be much less overwhelming because you know that you’ve got the fundamental structure in place and everything else is built on top and you start from an accessible foundation.

[00:37:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:37:34] Piccia Neri: Foundation is- You’re talking there about

[00:37:36] Nathan Wrigley: the structure of…

So put the H1 and then any other H is nested below it and nest things correctly, use articles and what have you. Just use your HTML appropriately and put things in the right place.

Meaningfully, exactly.

[00:37:52] Piccia Neri: I find it amazing how helpful it is to actually make me consider I want to say and where I want people to go. It’s an incredibly useful cognitive device help to content creation, in my opinion. If you start doing it like that properly, I’m told it’s also really good for SEO, I think. I think you probably know more about SEO than I do, Nathan.

I

[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: don’t know a lot, but maybe.

[00:38:25] Piccia Neri: Yeah, that’s what they say. On the More on the ROI and also expanding the concept of accessibility, because we’re talking about digital accessibility in general. But the thing is that if you, as a company, even as a small company, lead with accessibility and disability inclusion, which is not… See, I’m now on an Accenture page talking about companies that lead in disability In conclusion, outperform peers financially, according to their research. Their cookie settings is not as good because it forces me. Oh, God, it’s one of the evil ones.

[00:39:10] Nathan Wrigley: I

[00:39:11] Piccia Neri: don’t know what is his evil.

[00:39:13] Nathan Wrigley: A billion choices.

[00:39:14] Piccia Neri: I want I can’t describe it. That wasn’t good. Anyway, they have done a super interesting report on both… It covers two things. It covers digital accessibility, also disability inclusion champions, which means companies that make it their business to accommodate disabilities or disabled employees and what they need to have a better experience at work. They outperform companies that don’t do this disability inclusion by 1.6 times more revenue, 2.6 times more net income, and 2 times more economic profit. It’s staggering. It’s absolutely staggering. Funnily enough, the report is actually a PDF that you can download. No, it’s not the Sorry, it’s not quite here, but it’s… Maybe it’s below. Pdfs are, by their own nature, not quite accessible, so that’s interesting. But when you start thinking accessibility first, suddenly you really focus on the things that matter. You realise that sometimes we all do things that are not accessible and we don’t realise that. I find that extremely interesting

[00:40:46] Nathan Wrigley: because

[00:40:47] Piccia Neri: then you realise that it really covers everything. Because I was telling you about the client who is a form plugin builder who told me that they are Subsequent to my audit, they’ve built new standards and they build their tool accessibly according to certain standards.

But what I told them, and I said already that I told them, Yeah, you’re only covering one side of it, though, which is for screen readers, mostly, and keyboard accessibility. So people that use assistive technology, that can’t use a mouse, for instance, rely on semantic HTML to do proper keyboard navigation. There’s more to it than that, but let’s leave it at this for now. But the point is that, especially with something like forms, you need to take into consideration also the questions that you’re asking, the visuals of it, where you put your labels is very important, and also how you ask your questions, because you could be non-inclusive and therefore inaccessible, even just with the questions that you’re asking. Actually, I find forms and surveys really fascinating for that reason. Did you ever stop thinking about that, Nathan?

[00:42:20] Nathan Wrigley: No. Did you ever stop

[00:42:22] Piccia Neri: to think about that, rather?

[00:42:23] Nathan Wrigley: No, I do know what you mean.

How did you consider that?

You mean the accessibility of forms? The only bit of the forms that I know about in terms of accessibility is when any of the content is held within the field itself. You often go to a form field and the information that the person gathering the form wants to give you is inside the field and you click in the field and it immediately goes away. Somebody, for example, with a screen reader, can’t make use of that. But also things like the labels being above the form field and not beneath the form field.

[00:42:54] Piccia Neri: They always need to be above.

[00:42:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so you can go that flow so that you can tab through it. Yeah,

[00:43:00] Piccia Neri: Also because a screen reader will announce the label.

If the label is below the field, then the screen reader doesn’t know what the field is for.

I also imagine that when you got

[00:43:11] Nathan Wrigley: conditional logic in forms as well, that could present problems. Also when you’ve got multi-page forms, the ability to know that you’ve, I guess, gone from this first section to this second section, and then how do you get back to the first section if you figure that you need to make an amendment or what have you. I imagine forms are full dangers and fraud and things that can go wrong. All of dangers. Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

[00:43:33] Piccia Neri: Rife. It’s just like a minefield. But at the same time, I don’t want to exaggerate with that because once you educate yourself and you know the standards, it’s not that hard, but with something like forms, for instance, things like required fields, people are so required, happy, and they always make a field require. It’s like, Yeah, but have you actually stop to consider whether you’re excluding someone like this? Because if you make it feel required, but only a certain category of people can answer it, do you need it to be required or could you have formulated your question in a different way? It happened to me recently with a survey that was absolutely chockablock because I actually asked, is this survey for me as well? Is my category included? Because it sounds as if you only want to talk to people who are in a in employment right now. They said, No, we want the freelance point of view for sure. Because I said, Maybe I don’t have a job precisely because of what you’re trying to tackle.

Right, you’re not

[00:44:41] Nathan Wrigley: employed directly.

[00:44:43] Piccia Neri: But the first question was required, and it was a question that only employed those in employment could answer. The whole survey was like that. I found it really hard to answer. There are There’s things that people… For instance, if you need a name in a form, Nathan, what do you ask for?

What field do you put there? I would

[00:45:10] Nathan Wrigley: typically write name and have it in one field, or I might have it as first name, one field, last name, second field. Is that what you mean?

Is that what the question-

[00:45:23] Piccia Neri: Yeah, that was exactly my question. But the thing is that the first one is good. So having just one field for the name, but the second one- Just whatever you want to put,

[00:45:31] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:45:32] Piccia Neri: It’s not good because not all cultures have a last name.

[00:45:36] Nathan Wrigley: Right, interesting. So many, like

[00:45:38] Piccia Neri: Iceland, they don’t have a last name.

I think a lot of

[00:45:42] Nathan Wrigley: that is done to map to CRM applications, if you know what I mean. So they want to be able to map the first name so that they can then, I don’t know, email it and say, Hi, Nathan, not, Hi, Nathan Wrigley, or whatever it might be. I think that’s done for the convenience of the person running

[00:46:00] Piccia Neri: the- Exactly, but then you’re not taking your users into consideration, you’re taking your marketing needs into consideration.

Actually, I found out yesterday that I only ask… I have one field in my forms, but my If people just put one name in there, then the CRM automatically duplicates it.

[00:46:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:46:23] Piccia Neri: I’m like, No, please don’t do that. I need to speak to them and say, Look, you’re not doing this accessibly. It’s not It’s just basically wrong. There are so many things like this that people take for granted and they don’t stop and think that maybe that question shouldn’t be required. That’s why forms this hole. Actually, I follow a guy who’s called, I think he’s called Adam Silver. He works for the UK government. He is fixated with forms. Basically, anything that you learn about forms will serve you immensely for good UX in general. It’s extraordinary. He always comes up with such interesting tidbits that are specific about forms. But when you think about it, I have had recently to use, even though I haven’t lived in the UK for eight years, but I still have stuff over there. The UK gov website is amazing.

It’s so

[00:47:22] Nathan Wrigley: easy to use. I think a lot of effort has been put into that site, actually.

Oh, my

[00:47:25] Piccia Neri: God. It’s extraordinary. I found myself in a bit of a loop at some point, but nothing is perfect. But in general, it’s just so clear, so easy to use. Obviously, you listen to someone who has that experience. I hope that… I think that we’ve made a good case for the two main things. Two main things. I’m waving my fingers.

Yeah, it’s all right.

[00:47:59] Nathan Wrigley: Fingers in the air. I think it’s

[00:48:00] Piccia Neri: mirroring me, so I’d never know when

[00:48:01] Nathan Wrigley: my-Yeah.

[00:48:06] Piccia Neri: So mainly, accessibility as an opportunity, what is the main point? And then also, accessibility is not that hard, and you don’t need to be perfect, basically.

[00:48:22] Nathan Wrigley: It’s an opportunity, and it will increasingly be a compulsion under law, certainly in the EU, but also don’t regard it as the last thing which you’ll do because it’s a bit of an edge case. Nobody really is asking for this and what have you. You’re saying exactly the opposite. Begin there because Not only is it going to be required, but it’s also profitable. You can see that the likes of Apple that you mentioned are making great efforts to make their devices profitable because they know that they can shift more units if they make things like that. But also the data on the links that you put up onto the screen demonstrates just the wealth of money. What did you say? Something like, 270 billion is the value of the spend of people in the UK with accessibility needs. That’s quite a lot of money.

That’s quite a lot of money. That you’re leaving on the table. It’s quite a lot of money.

[00:49:18] Piccia Neri: Actually, as a closing example, I want to talk about something quite extraordinary, which is the Tesco TASCO case. Tesco, in around 2001, made… I looked for the sources, but it’s a very famous case that they rehauled their website to be accessible, and they saw an ROI of 37,000 %. Gosh. And that is a thing. It was extraordinary.

[00:49:59] Nathan Wrigley: So Tesco is a UK supermarket.

Tesco

[00:50:02] Piccia Neri: is a UK supermarket.

Yeah, and they

[00:50:03] Nathan Wrigley: shift a lot of product, not just in the physical store, but they shift a lot of product. They’ve got a very successful web presence. And so, okay, let’s imagine now that they… Go on.

[00:50:13] Piccia Neri: Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted you.

No, I was just going to say, so

[00:50:18] Nathan Wrigley: imagine the reach of a company on that scale, truly enormous. If they invest a million in making the website accessible and they can shift like £67 million pounds worth of stock on the basis of that, that is a no-brainer. Would you like me to put the screen back up? I think you’ve got something there.

Yes, because

[00:50:39] Piccia Neri: then what we did is it was 2022, we did this panel with Laza, who’s blind from birth, and he’s using Laza Bultowicz, is his name. He’s an accessibility tester and he…

[00:50:58] Nathan Wrigley: I saw this presentation. Yeah, it was good. Yes.

[00:51:00] Piccia Neri: Basically, it was meant to be off the cuff because we wanted for people to have a real-life experience of what it’s like to try and make a purchase on the internet when you are a blind person relying on your screen reader. We thought we’d use Tesco because we thought, Okay, they did so well. They made their website accessible and they made so much money. It was hilarious because then Laza, it was completely impossible for him to get past.

He got stuck in a slider,

[00:51:35] Nathan Wrigley: didn’t he?

[00:51:35] Piccia Neri: He got stuck.

Look, the slider is still there.

[00:51:39] Nathan Wrigley: He couldn’t get out of

[00:51:42] Piccia Neri: it. There was no way for him to- No way.

He couldn’t because Because they’re doing the focus wrongly. I don’t know if they’ve corrected that. I haven’t tested that. But also the commands on this slider are actually, I think they’re done correctly. I don’t have the tab navigation on this browser, I don’t think. But the point of the slide is that why have a slide? Make up your mind. Also, all the elements of this Slider have nothing in common. It’s like pride, it’s like Father’s Day. I understand that it’s big store that’s selling loads of things, but you’ve got so much anyway. Why would you do that? It was impossible for him to get past this.

[00:52:30] Nathan Wrigley: He was like, no way.

It was quite disarming to watch, wasn’t it, actually? Oh my God, it was painful. Even the likes of Tesco who did something, they then stumbled. It’s

[00:52:41] Piccia Neri: an ongoing journey.

It’s an ongoing journey, and we have no idea what happened there because I tagged them in a LinkedIn post, but unsurprisingly, they didn’t answer. But the thing is that, how do they know whether he was going to buy something huge? Do you know what I Whether he was going to be like thousands of pounds or euros rather than your weekly grocery shopping. He was effectively forced out of shopping at Tesco. That is terrible.

[00:53:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, not good. Not

[00:53:18] Piccia Neri: good.

[00:53:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I’ll take the screen back off if that’s okay. Yes. Okay, I guess looking at the bits and the pieces that you got in our shared show notes, you’ve You’re happy to call that a wrap, would you say?

[00:53:32] Piccia Neri: I hope we’ve made our case. Don’t you, Nathan? I think so. What do you think?

So Piccia

[00:53:37] Nathan Wrigley: is making the point that, yeah, it’s an opportunity. It’s called the Accessibility Opportunity, and hopefully, Piccia has managed to make that. We’ll be back in a future episode. I don’t know the exact date just yet, but the intention at this point, at least anyway, is to talk about inclusion, accessibility, usability principles. We’ll see if that maintains its second-place position. See you in a few weeks, Peeja.

[00:54:05] Piccia Neri: I can’t wait, Nathan. Thank you so much.

[00:54:08] Nathan Wrigley: You’re very, very welcome. Have a nice day. Take it easy.

[00:54:11] Piccia Neri: Thank you.

Bye.