Episode 10 - Richard Plantt

Welcome to our TENTH episode! That's ten goldmines of information, stories, top tips, and amazing insights.

In this podcast we are joined from London (no, not that one) by Richard Plantt who, like many of us, stumbled into accessibility and "worked it out".

Hear from him about how his eyes were opened, the lessons he learned, mistakes he made, and how that shapes his work and outlook today.

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Hello there everybody. This is Mike Hartley here with you for another episode of 365 Ally the podcast. So glad you can join us today. And my guest today, another somebody I know from WhatsApp and this is the first time we've actually spoke face to face as it were. So Richard Plant, good evening. Hello to you. Hey Mike, thank you for having me. Yeah, this is great. Fantastic having you. Awesome. Brilliant. Tell us a bit about yourself. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you do, who you are. Yeah, sure. So my name is Richard Plant. I am a Microsoft MVP. I have a background in UX design. That's where it kind of started. I went to school for graphic design. And my goal was to get into designing gig posters and t-shirts and all that fun stuff. And then I graduated. I'm kind of dating myself, but over 20 years I graduated and then got in. SharePoint, learned about SharePoint and started using that focused on intranets and user experience design and working with developers. Today, I am a digital workplace consultant for a company called 22Lead and we're located in Canada. So yeah, my home is London, Ontario. So I'm the other London, the small London there. The other one, yes. And yeah, just been over the years learning about accessibility. There was a time when I didn't even know what that was. Maybe we can get into that a little bit in the podcast or in the show today. And just growing and understanding how users interact and experience the things we create and build. again, user interfaces to even the code and the development. that gets put behind that to make it accessible. fantastic. Fantastic. No, brilliant. OK, so getting into the whole accessibility journey, I guess, really, as people who watch the podcast now, I kind of have a standard set of questions I do with people. And the first one really perfect opportunity here is. So what does accessibility mean to you? I guess how did you kind of fall into it and discover it? Yeah, it goes back to empathy for me. Thinking how other people experience your design. I know when I was young, when I first started out, I was kind of selfish in the sense I would create these websites or these designs and I would think they look great. And then I got to see how other people experience to them. It wasn't a great experience. So there was a bit of a humbling situation for me in a good way. And it was one of those things that kind of opened the door to me like, you need to add alt tags. You need to make sure users can navigate your website with their keyboard. Not everyone uses a mouse. Not everyone can use a mouse. And so those were like eye-opening aha experiences for me. And it just caused me to research and learn and grow because a lot of that wasn't taught in school, at least at the time. know a lot of progress has happened since then and there's standards and laws and things that need to be followed too. But yeah, that's a key thing is just empathy, thinking about how people will use the product or the tool that you use. And for me, mostly it's digital. websites and intranets, portals, things of that nature. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because I used to do, I still do websites as hobby. But yeah, I remember coding them alt text was always what what does this alt tag mean and what's it for? No, I don't need it because it means nothing to me. And Yeah, it was really weird from that perspective when you kind of just think, OK, it's not just about me, it's about other people. It's about this whole other demographic that I've never considered till now. yeah, I know it's getting taught a bit more in places, but it's... sadly very slow in coming forward. I think a lot of education institutes and training institutes and the like, they're now playing catch up thanks to things like the American Disability Act, the government design system language that we've got in the UK and uh New Zealand have got a GDS as well, and the European Accessibility Act. and all of those things. So now that there's a bit more legislation behind it, people are starting to realise they've got to pay attention to it. But I think when you've got dinosaurs like me in the IT industry who never got taught it, there's a lot of people out there who... never taught it, have never come across it and struggled to think about it still, which is quite a battle sometimes. can be really challenging sometimes when you're talking to people and saying, yeah, we need to get accessibility in this. they're like, I haven't got time for that. Yes, we have. Yeah. I mean, that was a common thing. Well, it still is. It gets tagged on right at the end. And we try to be advocates. We try to be like, hey, let's build it the right way from the start. And some customers are totally open to it. I think some too, depending on where they are, it's a legal thing and they know that going into a project and some just haven't even thought about it. And so it's a teaching moment. It's an opportunity for us to go in and, you know, actually there's a better way. But, and then having some of those patterns, I think will really help too. And just teaching people, showing them how to do it. And it's like, you know, yeah, that does make sense or that is a better way to do it. Yeah, yeah, totally agree. Totally agree. So for you in your daily life, what does accessibility look like? How does it impact you in your daily life, day to day? Yeah, for me, day to day, because I'm a kind of a designer, creative, part of my work is building user interfaces, creating designs. And so I'm always measuring things like how the contrast is, or is this easy to read? Are the alt tags there? So there's a lot of things that I've picked up over time that I just know need to be part of the design, those patterns, and applying them to it. Another thing that I've kind of picked up recently is just trying to be a better communicator, like just clear and succinct with my responses when I'm talking with coworkers, colleagues, or customers. because sometimes I can ramble, which just get to the point, Richard. And yeah. laughing there actually, because yeah, I can use a thousand words when ten would do. Yes, and that's one of the things it's just like, yeah, I just got to be succinct to the point, you know, still friendly and all that, but realizing, you some people, you keep talking, they'll forget what we were talking about initially. yeah, that's been like a thing recently that I've just been trying to add to my day to day. And then just, yeah, again, considering other people, how they, interpret what you're saying. And I know you can only see so much through someone else's lens or eye, but yeah, just trying to put yourself in their shoes. And that's also where it's important to talk to the people who do need specific color contrast, they might be colorblind or color vision deficient, depending on what you know as or people who do need to use alternate navigation methods or use screen readers because yeah, I I'll do testing with screen readers. I'll try them out. But I know full well I can watch somebody who uses them and needs them and they're listening to it talking at five, 600 % speed. I can't understand a single thing that's being said and they're just zipping around and I'm like, okay, that is a completely different world. to my experience when I try it because I'm kind of like, what you're saying, hold on, what do I need to do? So yeah, no, that's interesting. And with you saying about the alt text, the color contrast, I always say that the three easiest starting points for people in accessibility are alt text on images, Yeah. colour contrast and capitalising words in hashtags so that the first letter of each word is capitalised because, yeah, there are some really embarrassing examples of how screen readers can read some hashtags if they're all lowercase. I've heard of some of those stories too. Yeah, yeah, I mean, viewers, listeners, if you don't know what I'm talking about, just do a Google on hashtags that went wrong. Maybe not do it on your work laptop, though. Just just a suggestion there. suggestion. Yes. Yeah. To your point too, like seeing, I got to experience a blind user navigating one of the sites that we worked on. And it was a, I'll never forget because again, like you said, they had it at five times speed and they were kind of trying to show us like how hard it is just for them to navigate. is some of the pages don't have proper semantic code and they don't have heading one, heading two. So the screen reader was just going top to bottom, left to right, and it did not make sense. And I was just like, how can someone, how does this make sense? was, yeah, like I said, it was an eye-opening kind of experience. It was an aha moment for me. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, we come on to the part of the call now that is inevitable in this day and age where we bring our artificial intelligence overlords into the equation, the two letters that have dominated the world in the last few years. And I know I've had some differing experiences with AI and accessibility. And it's a subject that I return to and talk about fairly frequently with people. But from what you've seen, what would you see has been the impact of AI on accessibility from a positive or negative perspective? Yeah, Mike, I would say in terms of a positive effect, AI has made it easy to understand a lot of information. So that cognitive load for me, like if I'm get a report and it's dozens of pages and I just need to know like the key things I can share it. And Copilot's great at going in and seeing those patterns and not always perfect, not always right. So we know that sometimes it can hallucinate, right? But if you give it a transcript from a meeting, it can go in and it's pretty good at summarizing things. I love AI for that. I also love it for coming up with alt text. And it does a really good job. Even I've seen some of the in Microsoft 365 and PowerPoint. It's AI generated now. And it's not just like a one or two word alt text. It's very descriptive. Like it will say it's a person wearing a blue shirt holding this book. it's things that it's like, man, I haven't been doing that detailed in my alt tags. But to have it just do it so fast is really good. Again, have to vet it, have to review it, making sure it's accurate. those things, we can't become too lazy or too comfortable in that, I would say. In terms of the negative, I would say AI can also really amplify bad design because it's just so quick. It's so quick. So like, if you're coming up with a first draft of a blog post, or even if you're using it for AI, if you're using AI for images, creative type things, It's easy to just pump out a lot of things really, really fast, but is it as good as the quality still there? We have to be so careful, I think, for that kind of stuff. Yeah. yeah, no. The Microsoft 365 is an interesting one because that's one of the first areas that I saw Microsoft embedding AI into everyday products that a lot of people use day in, day out. It was so interesting because originally the AI generated alt text was not the best. It was very rarely accurate. It was a screenshot of a user interface. Yeah. Okay. That tells people nothing because it actually isn't a screenshot of a user interface. It's a screen. It's, it's an image of a gray tower block building that You might interpret as a gray windows application, but it has got phenomenally better. uh It really has. And it is fascinating to watch it improving. And the whole thing, the whole thing with summarizing documents and team meetings and emails my word that is just such a godsend of course you end up in the funny scenario where somebody's written this long document using AI to make it a long document and then we use AI to shorten it down to the bullet points and then and then we might use AI to compose a reply to it You think that? Yeah, that's happened a time or two. Yes. Yeah, yeah, just a few times. But yeah, I think what I do find really interesting with using AI for generation. So a lot of the plugins that are used on the 365 Ally website, in fact, most of the plugins have been generated by me, I'm not a coder, using AI to generate the code. And the reason I decided to try that, and I got surprised when it worked first time, the reason I decided to try that is because I wanted to get AI to create accessible plugins so that the output they produced was going to meet WCAG and ARIA standards, because a lot of the plugins in the WordPress library aren't accessible, or the content they produce isn't accessible. So I started adding in the line, make, ensure that every piece of output is WCAG 2.2 compliant and meets all ARIA standards. And I thought this will be a real test of it. I've used Copilot and I'll be honest, Copilot I find is a brilliant tool for business, but Copilot in general isn't a good code one. GitHub Copilot is fantastic. heard that. I haven't really experimented with the GitHub because I am not a developer either. I know enough to be dangerous. CSS, HTML, some JavaScript stuff. But just like you, I'll check the accessibility. And in the past, I would go to developer and say, hey, I'm seeing these things. Can we improve this? Can we fix it? Yeah. But like you said, now I'm trying other AI, not just Copilot, and saying, here's the HTML. And I need it to comply to these standards. And it's pretty good. There was a few times I was able to go in and update a form because it wasn't working as good as it should. It wasn't accessible. wasn't focusing on the fields. So yeah, it came. It said, you need to remove these lines. You need to tweak this in the code. I tested it and it seemed to fix those issues really, really easily. So yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I've I use get a copilot in VS code. I've used Claude and I use Google Antigravity as well. Now, the interesting thing is that a lot of them use the similar language models. So you'll find Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet in all of them and things like that. But I have found that the output I get from them, not only do I not have to lift a finger and write a single line of code, but the output I get, I put them through accessibility checkers like the Accessibility Insights for Web and also the WebAIM accessibility checker tool. And they do it. They've done it. created something that is WCAG compliant, it's ARIA compliant, it has all of the semantic in there, and I get green ticks and I'm just like, that is amazing. So I make sure I tell all the developers I work with that if they're using AI for code, just please add that one line in there because it will do 80 % more than you would do. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, and it's such a time saver for people. And yeah, you might have to go in and tweak some of the prompts or some of the aria tags. Don't always go in the first time, but it doesn't take much prompting to correct. And it's fantastic. It's really opened my mind to a lot of capabilities now. I am... I'll admit I am in awe. I sit here at my desk and I'll try something. I'll just burst out laughing sort of giddy with happiness at the fact that it's actually done this thing that I've asked it to and it's there. It's impressive. Yeah. When it does that and yeah, it's like, it's a superpower almost that, wow, I can do this. Yeah. Yeah. and I'm sure I can hear developers all over going no the code will be dreadful. No, you can't do this. You're doing this out of a job and everything else and Yeah, I do hear people like that. Trust me. My plugins are not gonna threaten the global economy for developers out there but I do also tell it to write the code in clear and precise standards, so hopefully it's a decent quality code and I can read code. I can't write it, but I can read it. And what I read does look actually pretty solid. So yeah, it's good. And that kind of leads nicely on because I'm seeing over the past three, four, five years how much AI has come to dominate our language and our world. What would you see as the future of accessibility in this AI world? Yeah, I mean, I see these patterns kind of we had in the past design patterns. And I think with AI, it almost feels like a new frontier. We're kind of learning what those patterns will be. And so making AI more accessible is going to be a thing, not just websites and digital and video and multimedia and all that good stuff. But then taking those tools, like you just said, using them for the good, for accessible things, learning even. Instead of having to go to a developer, you could just say, hey, copilot, copilot GitHub, how can we improve this? How can we make this accessible? And is there gaps? Is there things that I'm even missing or not even considering? in this design or this code that we're doing. I know we have WCAG and we have the checklist. So we can go through and measure the output, which is great. Those are all good things. But I think AI having those, having that library of information at its fingertips, it just makes it so much easier to go in and just design better things, build better things that more people can use. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it's going to be interesting for sure. And I think your first point there is about people accessing AI and making AI more accessible, I think is a really crucial one as well, because it's all well and good us being able to use the tools to generate accessible content, but There are developers there are not just from the developer landscape, but every day. mean, the amount of people who use chat GPT on their phone nowadays and that they're saying it's even overtaking Google for the most used thing. And you think, well, that means that's got to be accessible for people as well. yeah. Well, even a good example is Copilot. I can have a conversation. Like, I just talk to it. I don't really even have to type or think. I can just have it and hash out ideas, and then it can get the answers that I'm looking for too. So there is that not as much of a barrier to entry if you can just talk. I've heard friends too say, like, AI just makes their life so much more productive, like where they can't use a keyboard, or it's just cognitive load again. It's just a lot for them to type up meeting minutes. Now we've got the transcript. It's recorded in AI. I can summarize it. So yeah, I think it's just getting those experiences better. And we're seeing that, like you said, even with the alt text. Used to be kind of poor. Now it's gotten way better at understanding the image that you're sharing. Yeah, yeah, definitely. think, I think it could be very interesting to see where, where we go. Hopefully, hopefully we'll go down the right pathways with it and continue being able to create awesome accessible systems and content. Yeah. the whole lot. No, no, that's cool. And really, final question. And I can't believe we've actually come to the end because this has been this has been awesome talking to you. But final question for you. What would your what would your one personal hot tip be for for accessibility that you would give to people? one tip would be, again, put yourself in the user's shoes, their position. Try to understand where they're coming from. Don't just assume because it looks good. And even if you're doing multimedia, it sounds good. That might not work for everyone else. And so, Just taking a step back and understanding what you're working on, what you're building, creating is a big thing in terms of empathy and usability. when you do that, more people can enjoy what you create at end of the day. Love it. Perfect. Yeah, as you say, empathy. Empathy goes so, far. Richard, this has been absolutely fantastic. It has been brilliant talking to you. Thank you so, so much for joining me for the podcast. And I've loved getting to meet you and getting to talk to you. So thank you so much. Folks, that brings us to the end of another episode of 365 Ally the podcast and I will catch you all on the next episode. So thank you again to Richard and thank you all for watching and listening. Take care folks.