A new episode of The Digital Accessibility Podcast featuring Grant Broome, Founder and Head of Accessibility at Dig Inclusion.

We discuss;

• Grant's experience across his 20 years of experience within the Digital Accessibility and Inclusive Content space.
• Dig Inclusion and Grant's Hugr App which is helping to simplify and guide accessibility testing and reporting
• Working with specialist consultancies and;
• What simple steps everyone can take to implement more accessibility in their work!

Resource Links:

• Dig Inclusion: https://diginclusion.com/
• People Centric Recruitment: https://www.pcrdigital.com/
• Nile Agency: https://nilehq.com/
• Hugr App: https://hugr.app/

Joe's Social Media Links:

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

Grant's Social Media Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantbroome/
• Twitter/X: @Grantbroome

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.

Joining me today is Grant Broom, who is the founder and digital accessibility

strategy manager at Dig Inclusion. Dig Inclusion is a small company dedicated to

making digital media totally inclusive. They provide testing and training to

ensure that your services are accessible to everyone, regardless of ability. Grant

was also Web Accessibility Manager for CDSM Interactive Solutions, now known as "Thinqi".

Grant is someone who has dedicated their career to digital accessibility and

inclusion with over 20 years of experience in the space. He has invaluable hands

on experience, and we're hoping to tap into that today. So, welcome to the

podcast, Grant.

Thank you, Joe. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for inviting

me.

No problem at all. So, that's 20 years working within the field of

accessibility, designing more inclusive websites and tools. Many conversations

that I have include a part about how there's still so much to do,

but to try and make it more positive. I'm sure that there must have

been so much progress within that time, surely.

Yeah, definitely. The landscape has changed an awful lot in 20 years.

When you think about the developments in technology, specifically mobile devices

arriving, richer content, high bandwidth means

much more video and other interaction. And AI has just landed, so it's hard

to know where to begin. But I think the most significant change is

probably awareness of accessibility. So, moving on in 20 years, back

when I started as an Accessibility, you had to explain what it was, let

alone get people to try and introduce inclusive practises

or even think about having something like an audit. And that's changed. So now

with legislation and just an increased awareness of disability and inclusion,

people know what accessibility is now. I think the next challenge is really to

help people to implement it and understand it and start moving towards producing more

accessible content, which is the main challenge. But, yeah, certainly in 20

years, things have progressed a lot. There's been a lot of change and

there's been a lot of positive move towards making more inclusive content,

which is obviously a good thing.

Definitely. It's great to know that awareness is constantly being raised. And

obviously you've had a big part to do, you've had a big part in

that. And I think that the landscape in general is growing, isn't it? I

think we're seeing an awful lot more I say a lot on this podcast

is it because I'm talking about it more and talking to those people. But

I think in general, we're starting to see more accessible or more diverse

advertisements, even on TV, that are including people that are maybe hard of

hearing or deaf or blind people or people with disabilities sort of in

programmes and stuff. So even that awareness, I think, and representation

really starts to help as well.

Yeah, 100%. And I think it's been represented in a much more positive way

now as well. So I think historically, people have been a little bit afraid

of disability or unsure about how to speak to people with disabilities, and I

think exposure has been quite low. But I think that has changed and the

media representation of disability has changed dramatically as well in that time.

And that's just all very helpful.

Definitely brilliant. And also, what's equally, or even more so helpful is

what you do with Dig Inclusion. So could you go into a bit more

detail about what it is that Dig Inclusion does and what your plans are

for the near future? And also, sorry there's a few questions here. Maybe share

one of your biggest achievements since founding that company. Yeah, a proud

moment for you would be nice to hear about.

Okay, so Dig Inclusion helps companies understand and deliver accessible content.

So we do this through audits and consultancy and training. We also fix PDFs

and make them accessible, which is one of those kind of hidden areas of

accessibility which people often don't think about. So very often you'll get

a perfectly accessible journey on the web and that will end with an inaccessible

PDF. So that's one of the services that we offer and something that people

probably don't think about enough. So we've got a team of testers who

have deep knowledge of accessibility requirements and how to cheque content to

make sure that they meet those requirements. I think one of the biggest

issues that design and development teams have is just understanding the issues that

their content has. Well, not just understanding the issues that the content

has, but how to fix it as well. So we spend a lot of

time with our clients, helping them understand what these issues are, how they

impact on people and how to fix those issues as well, which is the

important key. Having the technical knowledge to be able to do that

is quite important. Back in January, Dig was acquired by Nile Group, based in

Edinburgh, and they're a really great company and they've helped us tighten up

our proposition and offer better services to customers. And in the near

future, we'll be getting better visibility on our brand. I think we've always

offered really good, I would like to say 'best in class' accessibility services,

but we haven't really had the time to spend on

marketing what we actually do, so that will be changing in the coming months.

We'll also be dipping our toes into AI and finding out whether it's really

useful for accessibility testing yet. So there are other services out there that

say that they use AI, but they're not particularly impressive right now. And

I'd like to explore whether some of the other approaches for using AI can

help our testing teams with speed more than anything, because accessibility

testing is a lot of heavy lifting, it's quite laborious and I mean, just

in the labour sense. And if we can develop tools that can help us

with it, that's going to be great. I think probably one of the biggest

achievements of Dig is probably not one thing, but I think that for a

company that was bootstrapped, we got a really impressive client list across

finance and sports, retail and charity sector as well. And

I'm really proud that it's grown from very humble beginnings

with no investment, and it's grown to a company that's servicing

some very impressive clients. So I think that's probably the thing that I'm most

proud of. And our Hugr tool, which hopefully we'll get to talk about as

well, definitely.

Be asking about that in a little bit. So, from our conversation when we met

at Accessibility Scotland last month. Now, we mentioned about the recruitment in the

space and unfortunately, one of the candidates that I've placed elsewhere had

been trained and was currently working with yourself. So it was an unfortunate

instance where I kind of poached someone from you, but I'd say an achievement

of Dig is that you do offer that outstanding training. You make some

people with limited knowledge, I suppose, in the accessibility field, you provide

them with huge amounts of knowledge and then they can provide that best in

service level across the board. So even beyond Dig, that's a huge achievement to

know that some of those people, that you've imparted that knowledge on them and

assisted them to grow in their own personal journeys as well.

Yeah, I mean, it's always painful when you've got someone like a key member

of staff leave, but at the same

time, I don't think we can talk about where they went to. But it's

very proud that we've managed to train people to the level where they can

go and work for some of the top companies in the world. And, you

know, I suppose it's a bittersweet moment in that sense. It's like, I don't

know, when you nurture someone and they just become excellent and then they go

on to do other things. I think that it's also a proud moment, as

painful as it is at the time, it's good to know that they're valued

in that way and to their own credit as well. When people work hard

in this industry, I think that plenty of doors can open. There's so much

that needs to be done in accessibility and it's probably one of the

fastest growing areas at the moment because so many companies are behind on

accessibility and they probably don't even understand the need for recruitment. So

the ones that do, they find the gems. And I'm really pleased

that some of the people that we've trained up in Dig have gone on

to join those great companies.

Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. And it is a shame because we're a very small company

ourselves, so it's really tricky that there is that competitive market where you

could lose people to other larger companies that can offer certain things

that we might not be able to offer. And it's an unfortunate thing, but

like you said, if we can see that the sort of bittersweet but more

the sweet side that they're out there doing the good work,

they're still carrying the torch, the 'Dig Inclusion' torch, where they learned what

they know. But brilliant. Again mentioned that we met at Accessibility Scotland in

September. Really nice to meet you face to face and catch up. So I

know that we've had a few sort of discussions online, but there's

something different about meeting in person. And you mentioned then that you've

developed a tool to assist with some more automation of accessibility testing

and that's going to help so many people like you just mentioned about how

laborious it can be conducting those sort of content and the tests of content

and tools. Could you go into any more detail about that tool and how

that might help?

I would love to. One of the things about accessibility testing is that

it can be very repetitive. It's just the nature of that type of

testing. Probably most types of testing digital products is you'll find an amount

of repetition. So we developed Hugr to reduce that or eliminate it in some

circumstances. The tool we've been developing is called Hugr. We developed

it as an in house tool or framework for our own accessibility

testing because I think we just got tired of Excel spreadsheets and Word

documents and reporting in that way. And I know that there are other methods

of reporting, such as through Jira and there are other accessibility frameworks

out there as well, but we felt that we just needed to have something

that suited the way that we tested and also to keep everything in one

place and simplify the testing process and make it consistent. So the database behind

Hugr contains hundreds of pre written issues that can be found in an

instant and every one of those has a corresponding solution and it's a guided

process as well. So I'm kind of jumping around with ideas, I suppose, or

concepts of it. But essentially, a person who is using Hugr, even if they're

a rookie, even if they're not that experienced, they'll be presented with a

spreadsheet. They'll be able to an online spreadsheet through a browser that will

have columns and rows representing the different guidelines and the different

types of content they want to test. And then it's a guided process through

testing and the aim is to populate everything in the spreadsheet.

But what's happening is that as people are adding issues to the spreadsheet, as

they add in screenshots, et cetera, a report is getting written in the

background. So by the time you finish just logging all the data that you

have, the report is written for you at the end. But it makes the

amount of writing and the amount of repetition.

I won't.

Say disappear, but it minimises it and it removes the need for a lot

of it. So it just means that we can get through testing much faster

than we would using traditional methods. And for our customers, it's very easy

for them to look at the report, they can log in online, they can

comment on the issues that we've raised, they can ask for more information, et

cetera. So it's a slick way of doing accessibility

testing and it's free as well. So we do have enterprise versions and team

versions, but there's also a free version that people can go along and try

out. It's Hugr app. So that's Hugr.app, and it's not an

app you'd use on your phone, it is actually something that you'd use on

your desktop through a browser and you can go through

accessibility testing really rapidly and speed up the process using that. So

I urge anyone to give it a go and see what they think about

it and let me know what they think of it as well. And if

there's anything that we can do to improve it, we will be all ears.

That sounds amazing. So I'm even going to go and do that now with

our website because like you said, it's a guided process. I mean, obviously I

know a fair amount about accessibility, but on the less practical side, and

what I'm trying to do is more courses and get more practical knowledge

for myself as well, just to better serve clients. But if something like that,

you said it's more or less a guided process, if you know what you're

looking for, sort of thing, could it help to train people?

Yeah, it can. So there's guidance built into it. So with every criteria that

you're testing against, say 1.1.1, which is alternatives for non text

content, or basically alternative text for images, that's what really boils down to.

There's guidance in there that is written in a very readable format.

So one thing about the guidelines that we have, the Web Content Accessibility

Guidelines or WCAG, they are quite technical. I think you'd probably need to

be a developer to understand them all properly. So what we've done is we've

taken that information, we've just made it easy to read and understand and also

simplified the test process for the different criteria. So I think that

probably anybody with the basic knowledge of HTML should be able to just

open up, Hugr, start testing and get really good results from it.

Brilliant. Perfect. And you've said a key point there as well that I'm just

going to circle back to very quickly about the WCAG guidelines and how they

can be. They're written in quite technical speak or technical jargon, which in itself

you could say, I don't want to say anything against the W3C,

they do great work and the guidelines are very helpful - Yeah, 100%

but in itself could

make those guidelines inaccessible to people that struggle to read technical

jargon. So that's great that you've got a tool like that that's going to

put it in more layman's terms, I suppose, or something that's, like you

say, more readable a wider audience, then in turn, making digital accessibility, or

the provision of digital accessibility more accessible, more people can get into

the profession, which I think is the end goal for this podcast anyway. But

in general, I think we need more support globally, people focusing on and

working in the space. So it's brilliant and definitely going to reiterate. Go to

Hugr app. HUGR.app. Give it a go. I'll put links, obviously,

in the description for this episode and I'm sure that people will be able

to get in touch with you directly, Grant, with any feedback and tips.

Absolutely. Excellent. Great stuff. So, during your time in the accessibility

space, you must have seen just how restricted and niche the field can be,

as we've just mentioned. But has there always been that skills gap? Is it

because it's so niche? And is that one of the reasons that Dig was

founded? And would you say that there are less roles available?

It seems that there's the need for specialists to come into multiple

companies in a system, so you need more of a consultancy framework rather

than an in-house team. Is that why Dig was created, to make it

more of a consultancy?

So, yeah, I think most

companies, even very large companies, don't have an accessibility team in house,

so most companies, at the moment at least, will be looking to third parties

to fulfil those needs. There's a huge skills gap in accessibility at the moment.

I think the accessibility lead role is growing and more companies are investing

in full time accessibility leads, but that doesn't mean that those leads can then

do the testing as well. That's not really their role. Their role is to

manage the output of the company, make sure that the company understands how to

create accessible content, also do the testing well, manage the test. And they

shouldn't really be doing testing themselves, although I think a lot of

them do get involved in testing because it's very difficult not to be drawn

into that. And it's a very tough role with lots of people in this

role suffering burnout, actually and I think that's because they just need more

support or they need more need to be able to shift the

load a little bit more. I think. I think the main reason is that

it's so isolated. So if you work for a company like Dig Inclusion, most

of those around you have a similar knowledge. [cough] Excuse me. And you can share

the load more easily, but even then it's tough because all roads will lead

to you. And if you're an accessible delete in an organisation, you often find

that you're the only one with anything close to a complete knowledge of the

subject. And you'll be bombarded with information requests, support, training

and other day to day managerial tasks. And it's easy to become overwhelmed. And

we see that happening a, you know, at Accessibility Scotland. There were a

couple of speakers there that mentioned it or even had it on their slides

and I've seen a few slides recently and I think the root of that

is just because the accessibility is hard,

it is quite tough. The approach that we take

in Dig Inclusion to get people up to speed, we often work with people

who don't have any accessibility experience, but of course we need to

get their knowledge up as soon as possible so that the leadership roles

aren't diving in and kind of doing the testing themselves. The approach we

take at Dig when we're trying to get people up to speed, when we

take on new employees. I call them employees, but really they're

consultants in their own right. Really, they've got a lot of skills and

a very deep knowledge. But we tend to take people who maybe have very

little experience, but they've got the right aptitude. And we've identified that

they're going to be a fast learner, or at least we hope that they

will, because there's a lot of learning to do and it's a process that

takes about six months. But they'll shadow an experienced tester or senior tester.

They'll do a testing alongside them. They'll have some of the simpler criteria

to test, and we'll just build up their knowledge over time. And then at

around six months, we'll let them have their own projects and monitor the

outcomes of those throughout the QA process. So it's quite a long process. There's

a lot of investment, I suppose, and time. But what it means is that

it's not a case of you put someone on a training course and then

suddenly they're an accessibility expert, their knowledge is born out of doing

the tests alongside someone who's very experienced in testing, and then we'll

find that they'll just be very capable of doing the tests themselves. And that's

the approach we take. And that's how we we create so many great

I can't say that we create great people, but that's how we foster or

that's how we nurture. That's the right word. So that's how we we nurture

people's skill set and accessibility. And it seems to work really well.

It's a lovely framework to have and I think, again, it's that imparting

knowledge and giving people practical experience or practical knowledge, because

we know a lot, there are a lot of certifications you can get out

there, there's a lot of courses you can take, like the ones I've done

myself. And it's not necessarily going to give you that mindset, it's not going

to give you the understanding of the user requirements and how different they

can be. And if you do something one way recently had a chat with

Sean Connor, who's the Head of Accessibility at Monzo Bank, and he was

saying that it is that mindset and trying to get into what are the

user requirements and if I'm going to develop or design something this way, who

might I exclude? And not many people think that simple thing initially,

which would help. If a lot of people ask that question early on in

the design phase, then it may make things a little bit better. But, yeah,

no, it's an amazing framework to have. I think you are nurturing and fostering

new talent and putting them into the marketplace, which is always brilliant,

good, brilliant, very rewarding, definitely. So for the listeners, for

people that might be interested in working with a consultancy, such as Dig

Inclusion, could you give us an idea of what the benefits are of working

with a consultancy? I guess you've kind of touched on that, because a lot

of companies will only they'll probably put a lead in place and say,

that's our budget, we've invested in accessibility, they manage everything top

to bottom. But I guess what would it usually be? Is it a longer

term partnership with the clients you bring on board?

Yeah, it has to be longer term. So, as we've already discussed, like, the

learning for a trainee who's with us takes at least six months. So for

a whole company to kind of gain that knowledge internally and change the

culture, it takes longer. So we do sometimes just do an audit

for companies because that's their budget. But the ones that have the greatest

success are the ones that we have a more long term relationship with.

Companies normally have very large gaps in their accessibility, knowledge and

capability that they're blissfully unaware of. They're creating huge amounts of

inaccessible content and that puts them at risk of losing customers. And not so

much here in the UK at the moment, although it will change. But in

the US, we see a lot of punitive legal

action against companies that don't produce accessible content. And I think we

are going to see that happening here as well in the UK. And there's

new laws coming out across the EU that mean that everybody has to have

accessible content, and I think companies are still catching up on that. But

it's such a complex topic and I think most people are under the impression

that somebody in the company is taking care of it, that they've got a

handle of it, usually the accessibility lead, but of course they can't do

all of it. And the reality is that teams are working flat out to

meet the deadline, and accessibility is one of the last things that they

dedicate sufficient time to, and one of the first things to fall by the

wayside. And that's because accessibility is so complicated. There are so many

requirements for so many different user types. The guidance is very technical, as

we've discussed, and therefore it's easy to misinterpret it if you don't have

a technical background. And that's one of the difficult things with accessibility,

is a lot of people, they're not technical, they're in accessibility because

they care about people or they're designers, and because of the technical nature of

WCAG for a lot of it, it's very difficult for them to get into.

So the benefit of working with Dig inclusion or any other consultancy like us

is that we're here to help you navigate a very rocky landscape. I

remember hearing someone say that accessibility isn't rocket science, and

I'd argue that in many ways it's more difficult than rocket science. At

least when you build in a rocket, everyone has the same outcome in mind.

The accessibility companies here to make sure your rocket doesn't blow up on

the launch pad, especially in light of those new regulations that I just

mentioned. And it can be very challenging.

Our role as a company is just to help people understand what

accessibility is, what the outcomes are for accessibility, tests for accessibility.

There's a lot of facets to it that we just need to have in

place to make sure that those companies understand where they're going. And it

takes time. So those longer term relationships that we have with clients

are the ones where we see the best results.

Definitely, yeah. And I love that that's probably going to be featured in an

upcoming episode is a quote from Grant Broom that accessibility is actually more

difficult than rocket science. I'd love to see people refute that.

Well, yeah, we'll see if Elon Musk listens to the podcast. That would be

interesting, wouldn't it? So do you have an idea of what you think are the

most immediate challenges facing digital accessibility? Like, say, the next year?

And you've mentioned the new regulations across the EU that are coming in

2025, I believe. Are they having an impact already on companids appetites for

accessibility, or are we still seeing that blissful ignorance or unawareness

amongst the business community?

So tackle that last one first. I think the regulations

will have an impact, but they'll probably be retrospective once they've come out.

What we saw with the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations [PSBAR],

which came out in 2018, is that the adoption was very slow. So even

though the regulations came into force, within a couple of years,

the websites weren't accessible. So what we've seen now is a lot of

reactionary inquiries, so that we've got lots of public sector organisations

getting in touch with us and saying we failed a test or this sort

of thing. And it's because I don't want to say that they didn't take

the regulations seriously, it's probably more the case. They just didn't know

what to do, they didn't know how to tackle them and they had no

guidance and they wouldn't have had an accessibility lead, so they just didn't

have the things in place that they needed to and didn't know how to

get them, probably. Although there was plenty of guidance from the Government

themselves, I think that people got a little bit lost with it. So I

think we'll probably see the same thing with the private sector regulations coming

out of the EU. Of course, in the UK we may or may not

have regulations. I think we probably will have regulations that match, but

in any case, the companies in the UK probably won't want to fall behind

their EU counterparts when that kicks in. So I think that it will

make a change, but I think it'll probably lag a little bit behind the

regulation. And whether we'll start to see legal cases like we do in the

States over this is yet to be seen, but I think it's likely, I

think it's much more likely. I've been saying for years, in the next couple

of years we're going to see some UK case law on this, but it's

very slow to materialise, but I think it will come. It's quite powerful, the

legislation that's already there, and for that to be bolstered by new legislation,

and for that to be brought sharply in focus to the public, I think

we are going to see the landscape change again.

To the first part, I think the digital space is constantly growing and

evolving and accelerating, actually, especially with recent developments in AI

and VR as well, and they're going to be probably the biggest causes of

change and things that we don't have lots of guidance on now. We could

definitely do with some VR accessibility guidelines ahead of mass adoption, and AI

interfaces are probably going to move past keyboard and screens very quickly. And

just like other industries, I don't think we have the right tools to adapt

yet. And we may see a lot of emerging technologies that don't have

accessibility built in. I know there's a lot of cynics that believe that large

scale AI adoption is still quite a way off and VR experiences will never

catch on, and perhaps they're right, but I have reservations. I think there's a

clear direction emerging and some of our current technologies, such as keyboards,

are already starting to feel dated now. I think if we really think about

it, I mean, they've been around for a long time and speech is something

that we starting to use more and more with devices and I think we

all want to be able. To speak to other devices more, but they're just

not very good at responding right now. But I think that's going to change

really quickly and something's going to give and I think it'll happen much

faster than people expect.

I think that's a really poignant point. And even just in my

own life, I've got a microphone button on my TV remote. Who would have

thought? And now I'm teaching my grandparents, like, oh, if you just press

that and speak to it, it will come up. Just say Netflix or whatever

streaming platform you want to use and it sort of takes that on. But

then instantly now, because of being in this space, I'm thinking, well, what if

people don't have the ability to use that speech recognition technology?

They're going to still need an element of the manual process. And is that

fair? Is there something else we could do? It's that constant emerging technology

that's going to keep everyone on their toes and it's the sort of perpetual

need for people like yourself, for consultancies like Dig and others, and

I think making people aware that it's here to stay. We need to constantly

and continuously think about accessibility, especially in this sort of

tech world we're living in, ey? Sorry, do you want to add anything to

that at all?

No, I was just agreeing with you. There's a lot of change that's going

to happen very quickly and I think we need to be more ready for

it than we are.

Absolutely. But yes, this might help then. So the final question I usually ask

every guest on the podcast is what's the simplest, most cost effective and

convenient way that someone can implement digital accessibility within any line of

work?

Yeah, so accessibility is complicated and it's time consuming, so it's hard

to come up with something that's just a simple solution. But I would say

that you need to invest, just invest a tiny amount of time finding out

what you don't know, just to give you an idea of the scope of

it, because I think a lot of people are mistaken and thinking that

accessibility is very easy to deliver. I think that very often we get

accessibility, we have to do an audit right at the end of the process,

where there's no time to fix any of the things that we find, or

do a retest or maybe iterations of retest, and we've had maybe no input

into the design either. A product in that, that's a very

precarious position for a product to be in. And I think that's just born

out of just lack of awareness, lack of knowledge. So I would say invest

a tiny amount of time finding out what you don't know. Spend maybe an

hour looking at WCAG 2.2, which comes out today [05/10/2023]. I know that this podcast will

come out later, but this is the day we're recording. So just so you

have an idea of the scale of the accessibility requirements and start

having conversations with colleagues so that you can begin to foster an

inclusive culture. Talk to an accessibility agency, maybe ask for a

meeting 30 minutes of the time so you can talk about your current situation.

And I think most agencies will be glad to do this, and the whole

aim of this would be just to find out what you don't know. Don't

be ignorant about how big the scope of accessibility is, the task ahead of

you to make things accessible. I think that's where the problems arise, is when

people just have no knowledge of it. And that's what we see day in,

day out with companies that just haven't given it enough time or attention because

they didn't realise how complicated or how important it was. But

as a quick tip, you can download an accessibility checker. It won't tell

you the whole story, but if you find errors, then you'll need to do

something about them. So if you were to download something like the WAVE

Toolbar for Chrome Accessibility checker and just run it over there, that

will give you a number of errors. And you're going to have to do

something about those errors, because those errors mean that somebody isn't

going to be able to access your website for lots of different reasons. You

don't want that. So, yeah, that's what I would say. Just try and find

out what you don't know. And I don't mean learn everything that you don't

know, just appreciate the scope of how big this subject is. And you could

do that just by looking at the guidelines or just running an

accessibility check and that will give you an idea.

Brilliant. That's an amazing tip. And, like you say, it's having the humility

to understand, to realise. I don't think it's quite a tricky

topic, I think, to talk about, because it sounds like we're bashing on people

and being like, why don't you know this? Why don't you do this? But

actually, there are people out there that know this stuff and you just need

to ask the question. Have the humility to be like, well, it's not something

I focus on, but I do care and I want to make sure that

everyone can use our service or website or tool or whatever it might be.

And, yeah, brilliant advice and that's a nice, simple thing someone can do to

take those first steps. So thank you. You're welcome. The final thoughts, then.

So I usually just sort of say, that's the end of the sort of

formal question, so thank you very much, but I just wanted to give you

some time to share anything of real importance to you at the moment, either

within the accessibility world or personal life or anything you'd like to add.

So I think one thing that I think as a general thing, I think

people need to, especially in today's world, where people are really anxious

about things and there seems to be a lot of concern about.

A lot of people are struggling with their mental health and things like that.

And we talked a little bit about burnout as well, which is definitely a

danger in our industry and something that I've grappled with as well. And I

think what I'd like to say is just be kind to yourself and remember

you're human and you'll make mistakes, but just be authentic, be honest with

yourself and others, and also invest in the people that

care about you. And it's easy in the world we live in today to

get distracted by a job or media or things that are

happening abroad or just big issues. You know, a lot of people are worried

about things like AI and the economy. But I think what we

should really be focusing on is investing in the people we care about and

the people that care about us, and also investing in ourselves as well,

building up knowledge, making ourselves more valuable, mastering something,

whether it be in work or outside work, mastering something is quite a

valuable thing to do. And also to be brave as well. I think a

lot of people get stuck in situations that they're not happy with, and I

think to be brave, to find ways of getting out of those situations

is really important, too. So I think, yeah, not much on accessibility there, but

I think these are things that I've been thinking about quite a lot lately,

and I think they're things that have helped me just to focus on those

things.

Thank you so much, Grant. Yeah, it's a lovely thing to add, and like

I say, I'm hoping to get this episode sort of edited and ready for

release in the next couple of weeks. But Mental Health Awareness Day, I

believe, is the 10th of October, so that would be either just finished or on

the day. So when this comes out, it's an amazing thing to add, and

I usually finish each episode on a quote centred around accessibility to sort

of promote that. But I think you've just done it yourself. I think what

you've said there is just as apt and I needn't say anymore. But I

appreciate that you sent me some notes before the episode, so I'm just going

to sort of paraphrase and repeat that for the quote, if that's okay. Grant

so to be kind to yourself, remember that you're human and you'll make

mistakes. Be authentic. Invest in the people that you care about and that

care about you. Invest in yourself and to be brave, I think that that's

just what a better way to finish the episode? So there you go. I

was going to quote you in a future episode, but I've done it in

your own, so there you oh, that's great.

Joe, it's been an absolute pleasure and I've really enjoyed talking about

accessibility with you and maybe we'll do it again sometime.

I hope so. Definitely I'm hoping to do some sort of panel episodes in

the future as well, so it'd be great to sort of get some minds

together to sort of approach some subjects within the accessibility space. So I'd

love to have you on an episode like that. I hope it won't turn

into a debate, but more of a discussion, you can't guarantee that.

Well, there we go. But thank you so much for joining me on the

episode, Grant, and for all the incredible work that you're doing within the

accessibility and inclusive design space. I hope that you've enjoyed the chat.

I've really, really enjoyed it. And yeah, like I say, we'll stay in touch.

I'll share the links to Hugr, so Hugr.app, Dig Inclusion, Nile

and everything else. So they'll be available in either the descriptions of

the episode or alongside the posts for it, but brilliant. Thank you so much,

Grant, and look forward to staying in touch. Moving forward.

Okay, it's been my pleasure. Thanks very much, Joe.