A new episode of The Digital Accessibility Podcast featuring Shaun Conner, Head of Accessibility at Monzo Bank. We discuss Shaun's experience starting out as a web developer and moving into the Accessibility space. Realising that Digital Accessibility is not just one team or one persons' responsibility. The work that Shaun is currently doing to raise more awareness for Digital Accessibility and what businesses can be doing ahead of new EU regulations. Implementing Accesssibility a practice level so that it is a fundamental thing all stages of the SDLC are considering.

Resource Links:

• Monzo Bank: https://monzo.com
• PCR Digital, Digital and Technology Recruitment: https://www.pcrdigital.com/
• Nexer Accessibility Summit, Gothenburg: https://nexergroup.com/events/nexer-summit-2023-gothenburg/

Joe's Social Media Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeajames/
• Twitter: @A11yJoe

Shaun's Social Media Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaun-conner/
• Personal Website: sconner.net
• Twitter/X: @EqualsShaun

Hi and welcome to the Digital Accessibility Podcast, sponsored by PCR

Digital, who provide people centric recruitment. Throughout this series, I'll

be interviewing professionals who work within the field of accessibility to share

their expertise, journeys and general thoughts on the key issues facing the

industry today. My aim is to provide an in depth look into the world

of digital accessibility and the impact it has on everyone. The goal is to

bridge the skills gap in the current market and inspire other people to join

the movement towards a more accessible digital world. So whether you're a

seasoned professional or just starting out, I hope that this platform will

provide you with valuable insights and practical advice from experts and

advocates within this extremely important community. So sit back, relax, and I

hope you enjoy the chat.

Today.

I'm joined by Shaun Connor, who is Accessibility and Inclusion Strategy

Manager at Monzo Bank, the bank that lives on your phone, who are on

a mission to make money work for everyone. Shaun has also worked as an

accessibility lead for the HMRC and spent eleven years within development and

leadership for the NHS. He's an excellent keynote speaker, experienced front end

developer, specialising in web accessibility, digital inclusion and

accessibility standards. Welcome to the podcast, Shaun.

Thank you very much. That's a very flattering when you read it like that,

it sounds like I've done loads, but I promise you it's not that it's

not that impressive.

Well, eleven years working through the ranks at the well, nearly twelve years

working through the ranks at the NHS. I think that's impressive to that'd be

impressive to most people.

No one can tell you you're not.

Loyal or committed to the cause, right?

Well, that's it. And it's, it's weird when you're, you're in a place

like that because you almost become a little bit institutionalised. And then

when I was looking for a new job, I realised, actually, the world

outside of this, there's like, much higher paying jobs for this line of work.

There you go.

Yeah. Interesting stuff.

But then, I guess, obviously being the Digital Accessibility podcast, the first

question I was going to ask you is if you can tell us a

bit about your first experience with Digital Accessibility and if it was a

passion. From day one, you get a lot of passionate people in the space.

Or if it's something that took you some time to sink in. Because I

know that, like I said, your background's in the sort of development and technical

kind of space.

Yeah. So it's a good question. While I was working at the NHS,

there was a conference, and I think it was called Future Gov, if you've

heard of that. They were like a really good conference and it wasn't an

accessibility conference, but one of the speakers who was there was called Kat

McCauley, and Kat was Head of Design at the Scottish Government and she was

a very sweary Glaswegian who was just fed up. She was disabled as well

and she talked very passionately about, first of all, it was around physical

barriers and accessible toilets and hotel rooms. And then she sort of transitioned

into the digital side of it and just talking about how really there's no

need for any of this stuff to be inaccessible because we have the

technology now to make things fully accessible. So I was sat at this

conference and I just remember sitting there so inspired by the talk, and

she was effing and blinding and it was very right down my street. And

I remember thinking in the moment when she was talking, I'm like, well, I'm

a front end developer, i can fix almost everything that she's talking about

here. And I know how to do that. You know, I met Kat after the

talk, and I was speaking to her for a little while, and I'm like,

listen, that has just lit a fire under me, because I can take what

you've experienced and start to fix some of this stuff. So I came away

from that conference and at the time I had a small team of front

end developers and I was sort of advocating for it. And then in 2018,

the public sector accessibility regs came in, so it was like, all

right, okay, I know all this stuff, but now we legally have to do

it. So it almost by accident became my job. And because I was inspired

by Kat and started running accessibility talks at the NHS, and then with

the public sector regs, when all that stuff come in, it was like, right,

well, I get to do this as part of my job now. So went

on after that to lead the full remediation piece at the NHS. So there

was a lot of things that we needed to fix. We had to put

accessibility statements on literally hundreds of services. The second part of

that was like, going and fixing some of the stuff, so it meant upskilling

some of the team. And suddenly I found myself in a sort of accessibility

leadership role and I enjoyed it at the NHS, but it wasn't very mature

as a process. It didn't really have the top down support that it needed,

which ultimately meant that I left and joined HMRC, where, as you say I was

an accessibility lead, there so much sort of better set up. There was one

of the bigger accessibility teams in government and I led the Audit and

Assurance Team. So my team was like seven people. Then there was, I think

the same on another team around compliance and governance, and then there was more

people and contractors and stuff. So it was a breath of fresh air when

I went there and it was like, these folks know what they're doing with

this stuff. And then, obviously now I've joined Monzo to focus on strategy, so

it became a passion, I suppose. To answer your question. And as soon as this industry,

people slam doors in your face all day, every day. And I'm a very

stubborn person and I just think, you know what, keep slamming the doors, I'll

keep opening them again. And it was sort of a match for my personality,

I suppose.

I think it's funny you say that, because obviously, being a recruiter, you

can imagine the stigma behind recruiters constantly banging on people's doors and

getting the door slammed in their face. Maybe I'm just glutton for punishment.

Recruiter - within accessibility.

Well, I know you get a double whammy, but it's funny because I was

talking to Jamie, a friend of mine who also works in accessibility, and we

come up with this analogy about our jobs as accessibility professionals is

almost to become those metal things that you put on doors that stop doors

from slamming. And then eventually people stop trying to slam the door because

they just think, well, this is pointless, it's just going to slowly shut.

I live and breathe this stuff now and for the past eight years, it's

all I've done. And we've came a long way and it's good to see

the progress, but there's just still so much to do.

Absolutely. And I think you'll find that hopefully not, but most people I've spoken

to that have been in the space for 20 odd years and they're just

like, yeah, we've seen progress, but there's still so much to do. And

I think it's always going to be the case. There's no full stop, I

don't think, because tech is always going to keep changing, people's needs are going

to keep evolving. So I think it's more, as we keep saying on this

podcast, it's about the mindset and getting people sort of engaged with it

and understand that there is an ever evolving need for people that focus on

this stuff.

Definitely. And I feel sorry for anyone who's been doing it for 20 years,

still telling people add alt text to images, but I suppose you just have to

be a certain type of person to just keep on keeping on with it.

Which is why you find a lot of passionate people who do this line

of work, because it's like, right, well, it's the right thing to do, we'll

just keep shouting about it. Yeah.

And it's horrible, because the first word that came into my mind going to

use to coin a phrase from Craig Abbott, who I know you know personally

as well, when he was on the podcast, he said, the unfortunate thing is

when I'm looking for people to work in accessibility, the first word that came

to mind was resilience. And then when you think about these people that have

been in the space for 20 odd, even yourself, eight plus years, it does

go hand in hand, unfortunately. I think it's like, yeah, got to be resilient.

You just got to keep on keeping on, keep banging down those doors.

You do. I remember I listened to Craig's podcast. I thought it was

brilliant by the way and you know, Craig talking about if, for me, you can be

the most resilient person in the world and eventually it's going to get on

top of that. I think that's where all the burnout stuff comes. We just

we want to keep on keeping on and it just gets too yeah.

interesting stuff.

This isn't a question I've already posed you, Sean, so I'm apologising. I'm going

to add another one in there, but it sounds like you almost got a

bit of a lucky head start with attending that Future Gov talk, hearing

Kat talk, and then going back to the NHS, where you said it wasn't

very mature. There wasn't the support top down. So your inroads to accessibility

probably helped the NHS on their way to becoming a bit more sort of

focused in that area. So I guess by the time you left, did you

feel that that maturity was starting to grow?

Definitely. So while I was there, off the back of the Remediation project,

we implemented certain things, so there was, like, things had to be signed

off before they went into production around the technical compliance of stuff,

and it was getting there. But I think the problem at the NHS was

nobody wanted to "own" accessibility. It just was this sort of hot potato

that would land in somebody else's lap and then they would be like, absolutely

not, I'm not having any of this, and then it would get passed to

the next person. And when you're trying, especially from an elite position, to

shout up about accessibility and they're not shouting down, then you're on a

certain path to failure with this stuff. And I did burnout very quickly at

the end of that, because I'm like, I'm fine to keep shouting about it,

but I need other people to at least have my back. And I spoke

about this at a conference that I was at in Sweden a few weeks

ago. And I was just saying I could probably find an old NHS service

that we fixed and we published an accessibility statement on to say, like,

right, we'll fix this by, I don't know, September 2019, and that statement

won't have been updated. So as much as we've done the work up front,

it didn't have what it needed to continue and start assuring some of this

stuff. So it might be better now. I mean, that was a few years

ago, but certainly when I left, I was disappointed and I sort of took

some of the responsibility for that, because I'm like, Well, I'm the one

who's trying to drive this, but anybody who's worked in this line of work

will know that you need buy in for this stuff. It doesn't just happen

with one person. Certainly not yeah, I was going to say;

you can't fight, it's trying to win a war with a one man

army. You just can't take that on. No amount of resilience is going to

help you win that battle, unfortunately, but great that you started them on

that path, so that's all good. So the next part, I believe that you

were part of the team that worked to get the DDaT Accessibility Specialist

role description together when you were at the HMRC. And a couple of weeks

ago I was at Accessibility Scotland, and Beverly Newing was talking about that. And

I know that you've worked alongside and things as well, so just wanted to

know a bit more from my perspective as a recruiter, why that was important

for you to get something together and why it was so hard to actually

implement that in public sector.

Shout out to Bev by the way, she is a lovely human. I've been talking

to her, actually over the last couple of days, coincidentally. But yeah, so

around the accessibility Specialist, that was led actually by David Caldwell

and Beverly, so they sort of spearhead that. And I was part of the

focus group. So the focus group was made up of different government

departments. And why this was so important was because, and I've seen this everywhere

I've worked, everybody approaches accessibility in different ways, which is

fine, there's no right or wrong way to do it, and we're all still

trying to figure this out, especially off the bat of the public sector Accessibility

Regulations. So we had to come up with some sort of job description that

would work for more or less everybody. So I was part of one of

the bigger accessibility teams, so there was two of us who went, myself

and Wojcek. So Wojcek was part of the governance side of it and I

would lead the auditing team. And then you had people I think we had

somebody from Department of Education, Kev was there, who ran Accessibility Scotland,

so he was part of it, there was like quite a few of her.

And it was good because it just meant that we could come to a

general consensus of what we thought this role should look like. And of course

it was important because we had teams who we legally have to do this

now. So just like you would have a front end developer, the idea was

that we would have an accessibility specialist and it was a route into

accessibility, which was good, and then it was also a route for people to

progress within the profession as well, which was just as important. And it

was an interesting project. I think at one point the job description was very

much looking like a front end developer, so there was a lot of back

and forth around what should this role look like? And as much as I

would say the technical skills are important, my view on it is that

we should have more user researchers, content designers, like varied experience

in there. It doesn't really always have to rely on just being a technical

person. So getting that balance right was really important. And we

got a first version of it out, and I think that's worth pointing out

as well, that what you see on the accessibility specialism was meant to

be taken by departments and add to it or create your own roles off

the back of it. It was just like a structure, really, for teams to

recruit. Brilliant. But it was just amazing to get that added to the DDaT

framework because it just added credibility to the profession, which we

spend a lot of time shouting about why we need accessibility specialists. And

now to be part of that DDaT framework, it's a massive success. And

probably one of the things I'm most proud of in my career is being

part of that group to get that done. I think I was looking at

the governance side of it, which was probably the most boring side of it,

but we got it done. And I just think to collaborate across many

different departments as well and come to an agreement was like a massive success

for everyone involved. So I'm excited to see over the next couple of years

how that changes and how we improve it over time.

I think it's also, from my perspective, obviously, job specs and job descriptions,

they're a daily occurrence for me. And we actually spoke pre recording about

certain job specs, and especially in the private sector, how convoluted and

complicated and daunting they can be. Because even if you have half the

skills that they've listed, because they're not really sure they know what

they're asking for, it can put so many applicants off. It can make a

lot of people think, I don't think that's quite right for me, or that

may be that I'm biting off more than I can chew. I think that's

a team of people, not just, I can't go in there and do that,

especially for the salary they're offering. So I think to get that

in the public sector, we definitely need to try and start pushing that into

the private as well, and just being like, right, take that by example and

just say, Right, okay, well, we need to set some edges. If you set

those boundaries and be like, right, these are the key elements that people should

and will need to have to be successful in the role, then people feel

more comfortable applying. They'll feel, yeah, that's an achievable role. I'm going

to gain something from it. I can progress within that rather than, oh, my

God, I'm burnt out. Just reading the spec before I even.

Start.

I think, what an amazing achievement. And you were part of the accessibility. X-Med

or Avengers, great group of people.

Well, people who are far better than me that was in that group, but this

was it as well. And it was just I think what we're starting to

see now is a lot of places will model around Gov.UK And particularly

around design systems, and the data framework is very much the same. So

private firms will look in and look at what a good team should look

like. So the fact that accessibility is now part of that, and then of

course, you've got the European Accessibility Act coming in in 2025, which

the cynical side of me thinks, well, nobody's going to listen to that and

they'll just pretend it hasn't happened. But what realistically should happen, and

what I would hope would happen is that firms then go, actually we need

like an accessibility team because we have to do this legally now. So we'll

see how that unfolds but really solid group of people who've done that. And

it landed pretty well as well. So we only had five or six departments

involved in actually doing that. And of course, government is massive. So there

was a risk that we sort of put it out there to get other

people's opinions and they were like, oh my god, you've got this all wrong.

But we kept it quite high level and I think that's why it worked

brilliant.

I know it's not a simple job to describe or explain and because there

are so many moving parts and different areas of focus within accessibility,

digital accessibility, or physical or social, but it's a big job that

needed to be done. So it's great that you were part of that, like

you say. And as I mentioned in the intro, you have quite a heavy

development and technical background. I know you're less so sort of hands

on tech at the minute, but you like to keep up with things. I

actually saw you posted not too long ago about Daniel Devesa Derksen-Staats

from Spotify, the iOS engineer who wrote writing accessible iOS applications. So

he's a guy that I'd love to have on the podcast and we're working

at it. So I know that you're keeping up to date with stuff, but

I think that there's a bit of a misconception that tech and development

is the hotspot. That's where digital accessibility responsibility lies. That's

a tongue twister. The responsibility lies with technical or development teams. But

do you agree as a leader in the space that that's where it should

lie? Or what do you think needs to be done to kind of share

and split that responsibility out?

Yeah, that is a real misconception. And my position on it is that accessibility

is everybody's responsibility. Most people don't know that. So I think a

big part of what I do is educating people around the role that they

can play and ensuring that they're embedding accessibility at the right

times. So that could be product managers, delivery managers, designers, developers,

testers content across the spectrum of the product and even outside of the product

as well. One of the bits that I did at Monzo was like training

our customer service representatives how to speak to disabled people.

Everybody has got a role to play in this. And I suppose as a

developer, yes, I could fix a lot of this stuff, but also developers try

to be smart and developers break more than they fix. So I'm throwing shade

on developers here, but it was me who would have to go in and

often fix some of this stuff. But again, it's an education piece and I

think one of the things that we did at HMRC, so the Gov.UK Design

system is arguably one of the most accessible, best built design systems that

there is. But we were finding that teams were making the same mistakes over

and over and over again. So what we did was we would log all

of our accessibility issues in Jira not jira, sorry, in GitHub. And what that

meant that we could do is we could hit the GitHub API and look

at all of the audits that we've ever done and pull them down by

tag and we could create this nice little front end that said the most

failed thing was something like error messages or inputs. And we got all

of this amazing data where we could go back and say, well, actually, we

need to do a session with the content designers because we're not doing

very well with our error messages. Or we would have to go to our

developers and say, you keep breaking radio buttons. Can we teach you how

to do this properly? So, again, it's doing it within the context of what

are the real problems here? And I think taking an approach like that, it

helps teams understand as well. Actually, this is my responsibility and doing things

like role based training, but again, you have to have a top down approach

to this. And one of the mistakes I made early on in my career

was I tried to sort of embed accessibility into teams. So I would go

to a team and say, like, right, this is your job. And we would

do all this interest, and you spend all this time training the team. And

then two weeks later, they would leave and somebody else would come in. And

it was like, oh, actually, hang on. I'm doing this the wrong way here.

So then I rolled it up a level and be like, well, actually, why

don't we just embed into Practice? So rather than hit individual teams, start

getting in amongst communities of Practice. So one week we would go

and sit in front of the automation testers, or the next week it would

be designers. And this is still something I do at Monzo. Now, I would

much rather do it that way. And then you increase your reach as well

and you can start measuring. Are you still seeing the same fails off the

back of it? But ultimately it's all about your users. And for me it

has to start with research. If we want research and before it even kicks

off, then you're almost setting yourself up to fail, you would have heard

this time and time again. But from my experience, accessibility is always

considered too late in the process. What's the earliest, the absolute earliest

opportunity you can get in that's usually like discovery, research, start from there

and build around that.

Absolutely.

But getting that sort of culture change, especially in somewhere like Government,

is really challenging, like trying to shift the needle. I hate to use

horrible terms of phrases like that, but trying to do that at that scale

know, Craig talked about this as well. It's very hard to change culture at

somewhere that big, and I've been extremely fortunate at Monzo that it's a

much smaller company. Like, I've nailed, we've got the culture absolutely down

there. I have no problems whatsoever.

Yeah, I think it's having that appetite, isn't it? I think it's tricky to

measure that with something as huge as government, but like you say, Monzo, you

can quite I'm not going to say it's easy because I'm not doing your

job, Shaun, but you probably start to see that appetite across the board

more clearly. And I think it's more of a I'd assume Monzo's got a

bit more of a startup feel. I mean, obviously government's been around

for God knows. So I think that the

appetites there in the sort of younger companies in the private* sector that are

sort of on the pulse, they can see that this is needed, they can

see that there's benefits to their business as well for implementing

accessibility and making sure that their products and services are usable by

everyone. But it's interesting because what you were saying on the role

based training and how you sort of try to implement it across teams, it

sounds like you're like the one-man-band

consultant that's like, right, I've

got the knowledge. I'm going to try and consult all of these different areas

and these different teams, less so taking it all on board, people emailing you

as the head of accessibility and fix this for me. I think that's where

it lies. It's got to be training, workshops, learning and development,

e-learning, even, and make it compulsory. But like you said, they'll learn that

and will they implement it?

I think you're right.

It has to be embedded in the practice and make it standard.

And this is it. And one of the first things that I did when

I joined Monzo is like, everybody needs training on accessibility. It's non-

negotiable. So when you join Monzo, if you join tomorrow, you would get mandatory

accessibility training. It would be within the context of your role, so you know, you

learn what you need to know. And I think one of the things about

accessibility and what can put people off is it's a big beast, oh, my

God, I'm going to have to know all this stuff. And actually, if you

do it within the context of somebody's work, it's like, well, actually, there's

not really that much that you have to know. It becomes big when you

get it wrong or you leave it too late. It was interesting as well,

because when I joined Know, the whole time I worked in the public sector,

I could count on one hand how many times I was approached about, like,

tell me more about what you do, like accessibility. I joined Monzo and

honestly, within the first, like, three days I was doing training myself, I

had, like, 45 messages from just people all over the bit. And this wasn't

just product people, this was like, trainers, managers, senior leaders, chief

this, director of this. And I couldn't believe it. I was like, Somebody's put

them up to this. Surely they can't be that invested in this already. But

I think they were just crying out for somebody to come in who knew

this stuff and who had experience of driving it to be like, right, well,

set us up in the right way, what do we need? I've used

Craig Abbott. I don't know whether you've read it, but he's got an article

around an accessibility strategy. I modelled the Monzo strategy around that

approach, and it works. You're getting your culture right, setting up some level

of compliance and educating people as well. So a huge part of what

I've done so far is just being around, like, culture and educating

people. And you would think that the compliance side of it takes care of

itself after that, but we'll see.

Time will tell, right?

Yeah, I hope.. Maybe I'm still a bit naive.

That's brilliant. And I think it is that, isn't it? You're planting the seeds

to then help people to grow themselves, rather than just standing over them with

a cane. You did that wrong, do it again. I think that might work,

but we'll try this way first, I think, and that's it.

But I think one of the things I've learned over time is that not

everyone's going to care about this stuff. You can do all the empathy labs,

you can show them stats. Some people just don't care

where you have to take a different angle, which I don't necessarily like

doing, is like talking about risk, like reputational damage. Are you happy to take

on that risk, then? And the chances are you start talking about risk and

reputational damage. Actually, no, I don't want to do that. So there are

ways around it and I think that it's just knowing when to use different

tactics. Like 90% of people, nobody builds something trying to make it inaccessible,

they just often lack the knowledge around how to actually do it. There's very

few people, or if anyone, will go out of their way to create something

that isn't accessible.

Definitely it's quite hard to fathom because I think there's a lot of

empathy in the accessibility space to think that there's people that wouldn't

give a damn nearly about it. It's hard to sort. Of get

your head around, I suppose. So I know that a huge part of your

role is centred around that strategy. Roadmap planning and implementation,

learning and development, training workshops. It's a long list, but as

Burnout has been discussed at length previously across the whole field of

accessibility, I just wanted to know, with your title, so obviously, access Lead at

HMRC, and then you're pretty much head of accessibility at Monzo with that

increased responsibility, that title, how have you managed to juggle that? I

guess you've kind of already answered this question, I suppose, just now with the

strategy.

Yeah, it's difficult and I won't say for me, I haven't spoken to

anybody who's got a silver bullet for this stuff. So I said to you,

I was talking to Bev about this and I've talked to many other

accessibility people who are burned out and I think we all find ourselves

in the same position. So what I've tried to do, we get into this

because we care. And I think that's half of the battle as well. When

you genuinely care about your work and you're passionate about it, it can be

very deflating. You're talking about the door getting slammed on your face and

how many times can you realistically do that before it starts to impact on

your confidence or your mental health? And that's like a huge part of this

as well. Right. But I think the way I've tried to do it at

Monzo is I've got a roadmap and I would encourage other people to do

this as well, because I think too many times we just take on too

much and can I just this, can I just that and everything's last minute.

So what I've tried to do is focus on, right, well, this is my

roadmap, I've got, let's say, two years worth of work. So understand what you're

meant to be working on versus what is business as usual, versus what is

just being thrown over the wall. And for me, it's been actually really quite

rigid and if I've got time, absolutely, I'll help with stuff. I

think Craig touched on this a little bit in his podcast as well, about

we just want to help people and you don't want to be seen to

be turning people away, but also we have to manage this and manage our

own workloads. And one of the things that I've struggled with in my current

role is working too many hours, and that's my fault. And that's because

often I'll be like, right, okay, yeah, I'll do the thing. But actually, the

last couple of months, I've just been saying no and it's hard and you

don't want to turn people away, but actually you need to for the benefit

of the work that you're actually meant to be doing. So I'll not explicitly

be like, no, I'm not going to talk, I'm not going to help you,

but if there's a quick something up and send them on Google or whatever.

I'll try and be as light touch as possible with things like that, but

for me as well, it's just learning a big part of avoiding Burnout is

sort of learning to accept that everything's not going to go my way.

So if you can get comfortable with that and celebrate the small wins,

take the small wins and celebrate them, shout about them. That's what this is

about. I think too many people look at the big picture, like, think big

and then start big. Well, for me, it's like, think big, start small and

try and do it that way because it is overwhelming. And so many times,

I mean, these teams, like, you've spoken to quite a few people. Now, accessibility

teams tend not to be big teams. There's like 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe it's five people.

Like, the one I had in government was the biggest one and it still

wasn't without its problems. There was all sorts going on. And I think

another way I've tried to do this is just, again, around the culture, do

people care about accessibility, make it their responsibility? So use things like

when I joined Monzo, I immediately knew, like, four or five people from these

DMs who were very interested in it. So it's like, right, well, how much

of my workload can I share with them? So that's where you have things

like Champions Networks, which they can go a bit stale, but I think if

they're done right, there can be a force multiplier for the work that you're

trying to do. But I think the biggest mistake I see people doing is

just taking too much on and then not being aware that you've took too

much on. I think it's very easy to keep saying yes and then before

you know it, it's like, oh, my God, this is, like, painfully bad. And

for me like, I lean a lot on people in this. Like, I've had phone

calls with Craig late at night before and I've been stressed and I'll text

them now and again saying, and I'll speak to other people, Jamie, I've got

friends who the thing is about this community accessibility is people

genuinely want to help each other try and solve similar problems. And I would

encourage anybody who's on. That sort of the line of burnout. If you do

want to chat, just drop me. Know, other people will try and help you

figure things. Know, speak to people, friends, peers, ask for help. One of

the things that we did at HMRC to try and avoid Burnout was like,

we had fire break weeks. So my team, the auditors, were front end developers,

so they weren't doing any development, they were just testing. And nobody wants

to do that. No developer wants to just be testing all day. So we

would have, like, once every five, six weeks, there was an entire week where

we would take no audits. It was non negotiable. The team just had a

full week to build cool stuff like the GitHub front end to see we

would work on passion projects or they could go and do some self learning

and all that stuff. And it really worked well, it was difficult when we

were grinding out audit after audit after audit, but everybody knew that the week

or two weeks sometimes it was that we would take a full two weeks

and we're all fortunate to do that. And I think it's hard, this line

of work. I'm not going to sit here and say that I'm always happy

about the work that I do. I'm frustrated a lot of the time and

I think that's very normal and acceptable and just be kind to yourself. If

you feel like you're burning out, take some time off. It is fine to

walk away from this for a little while. I've been off on the sick

because of this and that's okay. I think it's a

bigger problem. Well, not a bigger problem, it just is a problem because

we care so much and that we are passionate about this, that this

profession will ruin your mental health if you allow it to. But it's also

the most rewarding job I've ever done, but also the most frustrating.

It's a very strange balance of things, isn't it? That's the thing. And looking

from the outside in.

It's.. it's...

Is a bit mad. I think there are some people that will go and

it's not that they don't care or they just think how on earth am

I going to make a difference there? But another thing to remember is, like

you've said, celebrate the small wins. There's the quote that everyone sort of

uses in the community progress, not perfection. I don't think there's going to

be such thing as perfection because your product or your

tool might be accessible for some, but it might be by nature inaccessible for

another group of people. So it is just constantly thinking about that and

taking those steps and small wins.

And that's the mistake as well that some people would make and some people

being me. When I first started doing this, I wanted to fix everything for

everybody. I'm like, I can do this as a technical level, I can. And

we are always going to be excluding somebody. You can create what you think

is the most accessible thing, but we're always excluding somebody. And that is

just the facts around it. And I think again, if you just I would

talk about when I was at like it's tax, it's complex language. A lot

of it is like policy that can't be changed and rigid rules around. Like

you cannot change the wording and all this stuff and it creates barriers by

doing it that way. And it's like, well, start doing research with people.

Stop focusing on a token blind person to test with a screen reader who

is this particular service going to exclude and go and do your research

with those. So for tax, it might be people with Dyscalculia, people with

Dyslexia, people with ADHD. Those are where you're going to get the most

fruitful data around. Accessibility. I think it's just trying to shift focus

away from compliance and more around what are the actual barriers that people are

facing. Then how do we solve for that?

Yeah, absolutely. Like you say, you could have screen readers, switch

controls, anything that works with your product, but if it's written in complete

technical jargon, then again, you've just completely excluded such a huge portion of

people. Madness. But we'll touch on everything. I think

we've even discussed the recruitment within the space previously on the

podcast, and I think we've spoken about it before as well. Very mixed reviews

on how it's being done. I've spoken to some people, obviously, I'm speaking to

candidates, people that are looking to get into the space, people that are currently

interviewing. And obviously it'd be nice if you had someone that knew

accessibility, knew about what's needed rewriting job specs, like you said, that

was done for the DDaT and doing that for the private sector. So that's

what I'm hoping to be. So I'm trying to focus on all of that.

But do you have any pointers, do you have any advice for me on

how I can better serve the general community from a hirer, but also from

a candidate perspective? Have you had people that have supported you in those

sort of interview processes before?

Yeah, a lot of recruitment processes are just inaccessible and outdated just purely

because of the SaaS or the software as a service that they use. So

that is a massive barrier to entry to a lot of people because they

just can't actually apply because the thing isn't accessible to even get an

interview. So that's like the first part of it. But I think we talk

about reasonable adjustments and interviews and stuff like that. And like,

my position on it is like, they shouldn't be "reasonable adjustments", they

should just be like how it is. So I don't know, sending out interview

questions beforehand, like, why is extra time a reasonable

adjustment? It isn't, really. It should just be standard. Like, if you want

to get a good answer out of somebody, then give them time. A big

one for me is around disclosing the salary. Too many times I've had recruiters

like, oh, we've got this really good job, and we briefly thought about it

before we started this, but there's so much discrepancy in accessibility

salaries. Like, you might get one job that's paying like £70 grand, you might

get the same job description somewhere else is paying £20k. And it's like,

well, hang on a second. But the reason why I say disclose the salary

is because a lot of marginalised groups end up getting less pay. And

I think if we keep hiding salaries, then those marginalised groups remain

marginalised. So being transparent around that is something that I'll never apply

for a job where they don't do that. Because I just think, well, why

waste my time going through all that process just for you to potentially say,

oh, well, there's £25 grand.

Well, no, you've not worked all these years for that.

Well, exactly. And maybe that's just me being a little bit obnoxious, but

technical tests are a big one for me. I was a lead developer. I

would like to think I knew me stuff, but if you put me in

the interview situation and ask me to recall code, I'm going to look like

a junior developer who hasn't got a clue. I sort of understand why firms

ask for them, but some places are doing like three or four technical

interviews or go and spend 4 hours writing this full thing. Just think, well,

hang on, why, where do I have

time? The main one that

annoys me is just recruiters reaching out and asking, oh, Sean, do you want

to go and be the head of HR? Where'd you get that from? It

just seems, especially on LinkedIn, it's really bad. But yeah, there's just so

much improvement to be made across the board, I think, around recruitment. Not

necessarily from a recruiter's perspective, but just like all of those

systems and stuff are just like a big one that I see as well

is around. Like so let's say you have a blind person, they go all

the way through, they get offered the job and then we can't offer or

you can't offer them the job because your internal software just won't work

with the screen reader. You've just wasted their time all the way through. That

process known, fine, well, you can't do it, but in the view of diversity,

inclusion, you've let them go through it and only to let them down because

of this thing doesn't work. So I think there's a much bigger conversation

around setting up internally. I spoke a little bit about this on LinkedIn the

other day. Firms need to start taking internal accessibility a little bit more

seriously. The stats remain the same within your organisation and it's never

going to change. If you don't fix it, then you can't hire disabled people,

then it's a vicious circle, isn't it?

And you're missing out on an incredible,

incredible resource there.

People with disabilities or those that may have additional needs are still some of

the most fantastic and most amazing minds on the planet, regardless of, like you

said, not just your user base and the people that are going to spend

money on your platform or your service or your tool or product or whatever

it is. It's also, like you say, you can build better with nothing, with

us, without us, sort of another quote out there. But it has to be

that representation.

And what you have to remember as well is like a lot of people

who go for accessibility jobs are disabled, new divergent. There's a lot of

people in this space who meet that criteria and if they're not getting the

reasonable adjustments, well, that doesn't really set the tone for how it's

going to go for the rest of their employment if you're treating them

like crap on day one. I just think firms are getting better at it,

definitely, but, like, everything, I mean, we could talk about this all day,

we just still could always be improving on this stuff. Yeah, and I think

it is.

It's like standard practise. It's my responsibility. Obviously, if I'm saying

I'm going to focus in this space, I need to make sure that I'm

getting that right and try and lead by example. And hopefully it will create

competition, it will make sure that there's other recruiters in the space that

are seeing that this is a viable area to make sure that we can

help people find work, but also find the right talent and resources for their

teams to grow this out. But hopefully, yeah, if I can set an example,

then that would be great. So that's why I'm asking for that advice from

the likes of yourself, which is good. So you mentioned earlier that you

travelled to Sweden recently to deliver a talk at Nexus Accessibility event. Was it

just accessibility or was it just one of their sort of Digital/UX events?

Yeah, so it was just focused on accessibility. So it was

people from the Swedish public sector. There was some people there from Swedish

banks. Obviously, I've done both, so they were like, come and could talk about

how it's been approached in different ways. It was really good, actually, and

it was the first. I do a lot of talks internally and stuff, but

I always feel a bit like an imposter sometimes when I'm talking,

because a lot of this stuff, everybody else talks about it. So if I'm

going to talk about something, I want to be able to bring something new

to this. I don't just want to regurgitate what everybody else is saying,

because it can become a little bit like that. And I read the same

articles over and over again, so I've always sort of just put myself off

doing stuff like that. But I just think, if it's not for people like

me and lead roles and you are driving this stuff, if I'm not going

to talk about it, then why not? Exactly. So

I was nervous for it, but it actually went down really well. I just

think it's made us think, well, I'll do more this stuff now, it landed

really well.

Those types of events. And obviously I've mentioned that I went to Accessibility

Scotland and thankfully my boss helped to sponsor the event, which was an absolute

honour. And it's obviously, like you say, there might be some regurgitation, there

might be some repetitiveness with these events, but it's raising that awareness.

You're trying to let people know the work you're currently doing what's being

done, what they can do differently. I think there's a quote unquote problem. I

mean, it's the same with this podcast I've got you coming on here and

you might be saying some of the stuff, but the people that weren't at

Nexus event or won't be able to see that content, hopefully will be able

to hear you speak here. So I think it is just churning it out

and keeping it going. But the problem, quote unquote or air quotes,

is that a lot of the audience or the listeners of this are people

that are already aware or interested in or focused on working in the space.

So it's trying to find that market. How do we grow that out? Do

we need to partner with more design and product focused conferences and have

an accessibility piece there? Or we need to just grow that presence, I suppose,

everywhere? Because like you said, we need people in every team, really. Don't.

I mean, do you agree?

What's your view on.

I do. So, you know, if I refer back to the start of this

conversation like, you know, Kat McCauley was at something that was nothing to

do with accessibility and it got me hooked, so it definitely works by doing

that. I think the problem about this is that there aren't enough of us

to go to the 200 conferences every year or whatever, so

it's hard to do, but I think we're seeing more of it and I

think when people learn my friend Laura Parker, so you might know Laura, she

does a talk around Dyscalculia. She was one of the people behind the posters

around designing for Dyscalculia. She does a lot of talks, she's a content

designer by she has been talking about accessibility within the context of

content design and particularly around numbers and stuff. Does a brilliant job,

has been doing lots of talks at those events. So when people realise

actually this applies to what I do, we're seeing more people popping up at

these events going, oh, by the way, accessibility. And most people I would

like to think that most of tech is quite left leaning, so it's not

a hard sell usually. I suppose it's back on my previous point,

I should probably be doing more. I've got a lot of experience in this,

I've pretty much done it all now and I think even if it is

regurgitating some of the stuff that people might have already said, it still

goes a long way, I think, on an audience that's never heard it before

and we've all got different experiences as well. And I think one of the

things that always comes out in conversations I have with other people

doing this is we're all still doing it differently and that's fine. I love

to learn what other people are doing, what's working, what didn't work. And I

think we're good as a community at trying to sort of come up with

some standards for this because the Wakag and all that stuff, it's very hard

and complex. I think we'll definitely see more of it, but definitely

I would love to see more around training. I would love to see a

training conference where they talk about disabled staff and how to do training

for that. So there's so much opportunity in that space. It's just I don't

think there's enough people to actually go and continuously talk about this like all

summer or whenever the conference season is.

Yeah, no, absolutely, it's tricky. I think it's opening up a lot more because

we can do some more fully remote conferences, things like this as well. I

guess if we can get some more podcasts going, I would love to see

that. I know there are quite a few out there as well. And this

isn't the only one about accessibility. I'm going to do a piece on

that as well because I want to do that cross promotion. I don't want

people to just think, oh, it's just this one guy doing a podcast, but

I think it is just constantly talking about it. I think that helps with

the mindset shift, I think it helps with the culture, it helps just people

just to spark that idea. Like, what could I be doing differently? Which brings

me to the last question, which I've tried to ask on every episode of

the podcast, and it is what are the simplest, most cost effective and

convenient ways that someone can implement more digital accessibility within their

line of work? And don't worry, I know that we've spoken about all the

different teams that need to be focusing on it, but yeah, just in general.

So interestingly, actually, when I was in Sweden, there was like a break in

between and they put this poll thing on the screen and it was like,

what are the problems that the audience were facing? So it was things like

getting buy in, going beyond compliance, developing capability and budget. And

interestingly, when we came back, I was very surprised to see this, but getting

budget was the one that sort of peaked that list, and I thought it

was going to be like getting buy in or even development capability. And

this was like a winner by countrymel and I think

do you want to know how much I've spent this year on accessibility?

I would love to.

Less than 1000 pound. By the way, I'm not saying

that you don't need budget because you do. Like, I'm about to spend four

grand on an audit. But I think if you're just starting out and you're

trying to make a case for accessibility particularly, or even get to a strategy,

let's say you should be going out doing a gap analysis. What are the

problems? What are the problems that we intend to solve? Write your strategy. How

are you going to do this? Create some project plans. There's a lot of

this stuff that you can do without ever getting budget from anyone. And if

you're interested, the less than 1000 pounds was for Kit, for our Accessibility

Empathy Lab. So it was just buying some equipment for that. Of course you

are going to need budget if you need to fix things and bring more

people in and all that stuff. But I think what I'm trying to say

is it's not going to stop you starting almost so you can get

a long way with this stuff and launch a Champions Network. There are so

many different things that you can get going and do a good job at

before you need that. But I think if you are going to do this,

to answer your question again, think big, start small with this stuff. What are

the real problems that your customers or your people who use your service are

facing and try and get involved at the right time. The earlier the better.

We all know this. If you are start embedded into as many meetings as

you can. When I joined Monzo, if there was a meeting I was in

know, I was just there talking about this stuff unapologetically, just waffling

on about accessibility wherever. Like you will be surprised at how much buy

in you can get just by doing that and getting in front of the

right people, champions Networks in this community as well. Lean on me,

lean on other people. I've had so much help from people who work in

this line of work. I don't think I would have been in the roles

I'm in now if it wasn't for the likes of Craig. Craig's helped me

with loads of stuff like amazing. Like I'll always try and get back as

well. I do mentoring with people every now and again. I'll put something out

on Twitter. I'll mentor some people. I've got a few going now. I'll do

catch ups with other people who work in the line of work and I

just think we can solve things together. Don't feel like you need to do

this by yourself because this community is brilliant and you can get a long

way without having to worry about, oh my God, I need like 3 million

pounds to do this amazing stuff. If it's done at the right time, you

technically don't really need any money. It's only when they do it at

the end and it's all broken, then you need to go and fix it.

All right, okay. That'll be like 6 million.

And you're so right. I think it's such a friendly and welcoming environment.

And I feel that like you say, doing that gap analysis at the beginning,

just sort of understanding what the problems might actually be that people

encounter. Or if you've got problems yourself, it might even help to gain

that buy in because you're like, well, I can't actually access this system that

we work with because it doesn't work for me.

Exactly. And there's like, one question as well. If you are implementing anything

into your work, whatever it is you're doing, just think while you're doing it.

Who might I be excluding by doing this thing? That one question will make

you think. Right, okay, well, I've just written this 70 paragraph thing, that's

immediately going to be people with Dyslexia ADHD. Just by thinking in that

way, you will notice that you improve your work and make it more accessible

by default. Just by thinking, actually, this might not work for this person.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's just alt text, all sorts of stuff. And I know

that in this podcast series I've not introduced myself and described

myself or our guests and things which I should really be doing. But I

suppose because it is such an audio only I know we have the YouTube

for the visual and the transcript as well. But I feel like if people

are just listening to this on audio, they don't really necessarily need to know

what we look like. However, if people are interested, then I'm more than happy

to start doing that. So I guess that'll be something I'll put out there

if people would like descriptions of people that are joining us on the

podcast, but cool. So I guess we've come to the end of the sort

of formal questions. So if there's anything that's of real importance to you

at the moment, are there any talks coming up or what you're doing at

the moment at Monzo? If you'd like to share that with everyone, then that

would be great.

Yeah. So I'm going to be going back to Sweden in November. Nexer have

kindly asked me to go back, so I'm like, really buzzing about that. Get

to go to Gothenburg, which should be good. I've managed to get a really

big gig next year that I can't really talk about yet, but that'll be

coming soon. I'm always doing mentoring, trying to help people where I can.

If you're on LinkedIn, Twitter, any of that stuff and you need help with

this, or you just want to sound off, drop a message. And the last

thing that I'm working on as well is we've just started recording a podcast

with Jamie and Lion. Jamie Knight. Which is going to be really fun. Cool.

Jamie is a brilliant character, I love spending time with him and that's going

to be around, like, monotropism and tunnels and not tasks. So want to

look out for if you're interested in the new divergent content.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that just sounds incredible and Jamie is such an incredible

person to speak to. There's been on and off talks with Jamie over the

years of asking him to come on this, but I kind of felt like

I felt that impostor syndrome, because he's got is it 1800 seconds of

autism. There was something he'd done with

BBC Sounds? I just thought, I can't compete,

I'm not going to ask him again. I'm just going to sort of leave

it, but we'll maybe approach that another time, maybe we could get a panel.

Honestly. Do it. Jamie is a lovely human and he's just amazing to spend

time with, so I'm almost certain that he would come and talk to you

on this.

He's a lovely, lovely man. Yeah, I'll definitely get back in touch, but that's

brilliant. So cool. So to finish each episode with a quote centred around

accessibility, which is what I like to do, and it's actually something that I

heard on ID24. The 2023 Conference has just finished

and Neil Jarvis said; "Depending on which measure you use and which country you're

considering, anything between one in four, one in five or one in six

people would count themselves as having a disability. That's a lot of people to

close the door on. There's a strong economic reason for not blocking access to

potentially a quarter of your users!" and it just sort of, in a nutshell,

tells you from that perspective, if it's not the empathy side, if it's from

a business perspective, think of your users. You could be increasing by 25%

by doing this stuff. But thank you again so much for joining me, Shaun,

and it's been an absolute pleasure. It's always a pleasure speaking to you and,

yeah, really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to spend

this last hour with me and hope you've enjoyed the chat as much as

I have!

Yeah, it's been good. Thank you very much for having us. No problem.

And I'm sure we'll stay in touch. I'll get all of your LinkedIn and

your Twitter and stuff posted as links alongside the podcast, so if anyone wants

to get in touch with you, I'll direct them there, but I'll double check

which ones you want me to use first before posting them, in case people

start calling you at lunchtime every day.

That's all right.

Brilliant. Thank you again so much, Sean, and, yeah, take care.

No worries.

Another huge thank you to Sean for joining me on this episode. Hope you

found that as insightful as I did. As mentioned, I'll make sure that links

are provided for our LinkedIn and Twitter profiles for you to reach out with

any comments or feedback. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you on the

next one!