Ashley Firth, Octopus Energy, Author of Practical Web Inclusion & Accessibility

Ashley talks about his early experience as a web developer - trying to find the resources to build accessible products. He describes his efforts to recruit team members for the effort and how those experiences contributed to the writing of his book. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(soft music)

- Hello, this is Digital Accessibility,

the people behind the progress.

I'm Joe Welinske, the creator and host of this series.

And as an accessibility professional myself,

I find it very interesting

as to how others have found their way into this profession.

So let's meet one of those people right now

and hear about their journey.

(upbeat music)

All right, well, welcome.

Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Ashley Firth.

Hi, Ashley, how are you doing today?

- Hey, I'm good, thanks.

How are you.

- I'm doing pretty good.

I am in my home office in Vashon Island, near Seattle,

which is where Blink's headquarters are.

And we're just starting to get back

into doing some office visits,

but still working from home mostly.

Where are you talking to me from?

- I'm talking to you from London in the United Kingdom.

We are still doing a bit of a mixture of office visits.

A lot of people still working from home,

very much a personal preference at the moment.

We are edging towards various freedoms

somewhere near mid July,

we're supposed to be a little bit more free,

but being safe up until that point.

- Being safe and healthy is very important.

So well, I, yeah,

there are a number of things

that I thought we could talk about,

but maybe a good place to start

would be if you could give like a brief description

of what you're doing today.

- Sure thing, yeah.

So right now, as of today,

my job title is Head of Interfaces,

which is a broad and weird job title to describe

the idea that I bring front end developers,

back end developers, mobile developers,

and designers together to solve problems effectively.

And the problems we're solving are in the energy industry.

So I work for Octopus Energy,

who are an energy supplier in the UK.

We did recently open up in the US over in Texas

and a few other places across the world.

So my job is to try and make all of those experiences

feel consistent, feel great, feel seamless

and feel inclusive, importantly as well,

to make sure that everyone

can kind of engage with the content

and make sure everybody that works for us is aware

of just how important that is.

- And the thing that ended up connecting me with you

was your book, Practical Web Inclusion and Accessibility,

and that's something that we can talk about

a little bit more later,

but that's probably related to the work

that you're doing there as well, right?

- Oh, no doubt.

Yes, no doubt.

It's the result of a lot of work that has gone in.

A lot of places that perhaps didn't care about it

as much as they should,

and then helping to build a place that truly did.

So, yeah, that was the combination of all of that.

- Well, one of the things that I'm interested in

in these interviews that I'm doing here

is just finding out how people found their way

to the accessibility work that they're doing today.

For many of us, it's not a straight path

or one that we even knew we were on when we started it,

but why don't you talk a little bit,

you know, kind of pick a starting point for your career,

you know, some of the highlights,

you know, kind of where you started

and what the progression was

that got you to where you are today.

- Sure, yeah, no problem.

I think probably one of the most important starting points

is when I didn't know about accessibility.

To be honest with you,

I studied in a place called Bournemouth

in the south of England, and nothing about my degree

taught me about accessibility unfortunately.

We got the opportunity

to learn a little bit about web design

and development game design and development,

all of that great stuff, but there wasn't really anything

that placed an emphasis on that,

which looking back now is a real shame,

and I know that there's work going in

to try and make that better,

but I came out into the industry,

you know, me and a lot of colleagues

unaware of that as a general area,

and started working in an agency in central London,

which had some great clients,

you know, a lot of nice names, a lot of names that I knew

and I was excited to work on

for various different projects

in various different timeframes,

but one thing that seemed quite consistent to me

was the pace at which everything was being built

and the priorities those people had

when they were building them.

So we would build a website for, you know,

a well-known client

and it had to be done in X amount of months

and when that happens,

you can only throw so many people at it

and decisions start being made

about where the effort should be posted.

Should it be, you know,

try and get an extra feature put in there,

is it to make it work for a certain number of older browsers

or anything like that?

And one thing that didn't really factor

into that conversation is okay, but you know,

what if somebody doesn't see the sign?

What if they don't see the various colors of that site?

You know, what if they don't navigate it with a mouse,

is it still possible?

Is there anything that allows them to think about like that?

And I had started having a little bit of a look

at that general area, purely out of curiosity, to be honest,

to kind of understand why there wasn't a conversation

going on about these things,

because it's, I mean, you will know

it's one of those threads you pull and it just keeps going

and it keeps going, and there's a whole rabbit hole

to explore and it confused me a lot

why that wasn't at the forefront of the conversations

that were being had.

I was spending time making a website work for a browser

that very few people still used.

It's usually the client themselves

that had outdated computers.

You know, your old i8s and 9s

that needed to make sure that this website worked

in a decent way and worked for them,

but didn't give any emphasis to accessibility at all.

And so it was that amongst a few other things

that got me thinking that maybe my efforts

were being put in the wrong place, to be honest with you.

You know, it sounded good to have these names working

on your CV, but I didn't feel like I was building something

I could be proud of.

And, you know, there was no good answer

when somebody would say, well, why doesn't it work

in this way?

Why couldn't it work in this way?

Which was a start of a real frustration to me.

- Well, yeah, let's just kind of stop there for a second,

because you mentioned, you know, pulling the thread

and the rabbit hole,

and certainly, I think most of us

that start to explore accessibility for the first time

realize that there there's a lot

that's already been discussed out there,

but what exactly was it that you, you know, identified,

like what were some of the resources

that you identified at the time,

and kind of, what was your feeling as you started to,

you know, find your way down that rabbit hole?

- Yeah, good question.

I remember the first tool that I properly had a look at

was a series of do and don't posters

that were made by the UK government.

So we have something called the GDS,

or the Government Digital Service

that by law are required to be accessible

to a certain level, which is WCAG 2.1 at AA level.

They have to ensure that all their journeys

are kind of that level.

And after the equality act, a lot of effort went in there

to ensure that they were getting to that point.

And as part of that,

they were sharing some of the experiences

that they had had as they were going through these journeys.

And they had created these series of posters

and they were just really top level things.

As you said, kind of each one of them,

its own kind of cluster of things

that you can then go and ask a thousand questions about,

but it was the very first thing.

You could kind of pop them up on the walls

and they would be there constantly.

You would be working and it would tweak in your brain

and you would go, okay, yeah, cool,

I need to think about that.

And all those prompts, they exist everywhere.

And so from each one of those,

it created an area, like a topic

that I was like, okay, you know what,

this week I'm gonna go and find out everything I can

about screen readers.

You know, let me try JAWS for a bit.

And let me try what voiceover is

and what's the difference between them?

You know, let me try doing my job for a week,

just with a screen reader.

Can I get by?

Can I learn what the deal is with that?

And other great things that they have

from like going down that GDS kind of avenue

was that they have empathy labs in the UK as well,

which allow you to kind of go

and to the best of their ability,

try and simulate some of these access needs, right?

And you can understand what it would be like

to have a sensory deprivation,

or, you know, a visual impairment or something like that.

You know, not absolutely copy for the real thing, of course,

but it's a starter,

it's something that allows you to start going,

oh, okay, yeah.

I'm starting to really understand

beyond like a persona profile,

you know, where you try a hypothetical test

and say, okay, you know,

Jane is 25 and she has a visual impairment.

Can I get through this journey?

You start to go, okay, well, can I do that myself?

Is that something that's at all possible?

So I think those were the main things initially

that had me going, okay,

I need to understand this is what one company is doing

in one area, because they have to.

Let me understand a little bit more of the people

that are kind of going at this when they don't have to,

and the conversations that exist there.

And that led me to various meetups.

They hosted a lot of those.

So again, it's a bit like the topics themselves.

You start with one area, they are doing some other things.

They are doing things in another avenue.

You start to meet like-minded people,

you start to find other resources.

And it just kind of kept going from one to the other.

I would just hop around all of these various different areas

and understand as much as I could

and meet people with those access needs

to truly understand what it was

that was causing those barriers

between the content that should be so easy for them

to kind of access online, given the platform that it's on,

but it has reached a situation where they're being failed

by the people that are building these things unfortunately,

sometimes without them even knowing.

- And did you have receive support from your organization

that you were working on at the time?

I know that's an issue for people.

I mean, a lot of us kind of get in just doing it

because we wanna learn ourselves,

but it's always helpful if we get support

in the daily work that we do.

How did it shake out for you?

- The place I was at when I first started researching,

I did not have buy-in for sure.

I was doing this on my own time.

I was kind of understanding this

as much as I could in and around.

I of course would have conversations with people,

you know, on client work,

if that was product or project managers,

if it was stakeholders, et cetera, to kind of say,

we should probably have a look at this,

but it wasn't until I joined the company that I'm at now,

where we were starting from the ground up.

You know, I was one of the first people in

to try and set values that would stay with us

through the whole time, right.

And so really early on in that journey,

I spoke to our CEO, Greg and said,

hey, I need to truly understand what this is.

We want it to be a tech first company.

We wanted to provide solutions that were truly inclusive,

and I didn't feel like even after doing

the reading that I had done,

I didn't feel equipped enough

to kind of start building something

without truly understanding the different avenues

that people might engage with it.

So I said to him, I need a bit of time.

You know, everything that a CEO doesn't wanna hear.

You know, when we don't have a quote journey

and we don't have any customers

and we haven't signed anybody up,

I said, I need about three weeks.

I need to go away.

I need to have a look at everything.

There was no way I was gonna get all of the knowledge

in three months, but I had three weeks,

but I could understand enough of it initially

to build something that I wouldn't look back on and regret.

And to his credit, he was like, yeah, okay.

We need to do it right.

Let's see if we can build this

into everything that we're doing

so that we don't try and alter on,

or find a halfway solution with a third party down the line.

Let's see if we can build something

that's actually inclusive.

And so I'm very thankful to that.

It's amongst many of the other reasons why I'm still here,

why I'm still trying to kind of push that along

and why other people have joined in many instances,

you know, us as a supplier or us as a employer,

because these are the things that matter to us,

and we actually put the time in,

and it's the first time I've experienced that,

and I'm very thankful

that he was so understanding at that time,

because it's allowed it to kind of, to grow

and be really one of the pillars

of what we think is important, right.

They're our customers, and they wanna engage with us

and they have the right to do that

in the way that they want to.

- And so then as you've moved forward,

you know, working on different projects over time,

different organizations,

have you kind of coming at it as like the one person

in your organization working on it,

like from a developer's perspective,

or, you know, have you, you know, had designers,

researchers also kind of part of a team.

It's different, you know, for different people,

but sometimes developers end up just having to do it

at the end of the project,

because nothing else has happened before that.

And that's always an unfortunate situation,

but kind of what were your experiences in that area?

- Yeah, it's entirely fair point.

I think one of the first things that has always struck me

going through this over the past few years,

is I've never met a developer that hasn't wanted

to make their sites accessible, right?

Not one, to be honest with you has gone,

no, I've got no interest in it.

People are completely willing to do it,

and they want to, because developers are curious.

They wanna kind of understand the various ways

that people can connect with it.

The problem that we had

was that certainly when I was looking

before I kind of started writing the book,

was that they were very technical guides

and very long and lengthy guides

to how to make things accessible.

We of course have a framework, which is great to have,

you know, it's nice to have success criteria.

It's nice to be able to measure it against something,

but let's not get it twisted.

It's a very intense thing to try and engage with.

To begin with, I know if I hadn't found certain resources,

I would have found it a lot harder to do that.

And so having conversations with developers

was a lot easier than having it with product managers

or designers who much like us,

hadn't really had anything in that kind of teaching

about learning previous for it,

but also didn't really a resource like you know, WCAG

and things like that to do something about it.

And so this is what started formulating the idea in my mind,

is that I wanted to be that kind of initial

accessibility champion and to be like the person

that's willing to have those conversations,

and be someone you can go to,

but ultimately that the company wouldn't need one

because everybody would be one, right?

That's the goal eventually,

rather than having someone drive forward an issue,

that everybody would have bought into the issue,

and everyone would be thinking about it

when they do their work,

because then it needs very little governing

or kind of monitoring or auditing.

Everyone is just involved.

And so I wanted to create a conversation that we could have

that didn't feel difficult

for different disciplines to engage with.

You didn't need to understand coding

to get why it was important to do the things

that we were trying to do,

to understand at least at a basic level,

the barriers that people were coming across

when they were engaging with content

that we would look at proudly and say,

oh, well, this is a lovely website,

it's a really nice webpage,

without thinking about this other almost forgotten area

of the audience, that were just not getting an experience

anywhere like something we thought we had built proudly

for everybody else.

It was not inclusive.

So that was probably my initial experience,

is one of enthusiasm from all of the developers,

and one of curiosity

from all of the other parts of the business,

because they were hearing it for the first time, truly.

It was the first time they'd heard about.

- You mentioned the government regulations

around accessibility.

In the United States, you know, we have a legal framework

around that as well,

most of which is related to selling digital products

and services into the government

and then that can start at the federal level,

but carry down state, municipal level,

but at least the United States, you know,

outside of that, it ends up

that it's up to individual organizations to decide,

you know, how they wanna approach that.

In some situations, organizations wanna make sure

that they don't get into lawsuits related to accessibility,

but there are also a lot of organizations

that understand the ROI of it

and also understand that it just kind of fits the company

and product culture that they want to have.

How does it kind of sort out with the projects

that you've worked on?

Is it then more the stick versus the carrot,

or, you know, kind of,

what's been the balance in your experience?

- It's a good question.

I mean, I'm biased course to begin with.

So I'll always say that it's the stick side of things,

is that we didn't wanna make something

that wasn't going to be for everybody, right?

And we get a lot of messages,

and they're supposed to be nice messages

and there is an aspect of them that is hugely nice to hear.

You know, we receive messages from customers that say,

I haven't been able to manage my energy before now,

you know, I've had a friend or a loved one to do it

because it's been terribly inaccessible.

I now feel like I can have control over this.

And I'm very proud.

You know, I feel immensely proud

to receive messages like that.

And then I think to myself,

should someone have to choose us for that reason, right?

Like there are so many reasons

that you might buy our product,

so many reasons that you might prefer one to the other.

But what we're talking about is like the basic ability

to manage something that is essential

on a day to day, right?

To kind of keep your energy bills in check

and to make sure that you're able to submit readings

and all that stuff.

Like I would wanna see an industry

where everybody has to adhere to that standard,

and then you choose a product based on the values

that match yours.

Is it renewable?

Is it the cheapest that it could be?

Do they have great customer service?

These are all things that,

you know, make a business a business,

and I can completely understand that each one

are better or worse at some of those things.

Accessibility, despite you said the kind of the ROI thing,

you know, that that is a very real thing.

You know, it's a lot that can be contributed financially,

but I hate the idea that it's something

that you have to sell into people, right?

That you have to say,

hey, look at what this can kind of benefit

from your business.

I understand there is a semblance of reality to that,

but in my head, everyone should be at a basic level

where people are able to engage with your product,

and then they choose whether their product is for you.

The accessibility is not part of the product.

It shouldn't be, it should just be there.

And although, you know,

we've been developing it for a while,

we've been trying to talk to our competitors effectively

in the market, the people around us,

just to kind of share resources and share the book

and kind of say, you know,

how's about you have a look at this as well,

and, you know, everybody will get an opportunity

to choose between a range of products

based on what they like about your product

and not if they can actually get to your product.

That for me is a real,

it feels like a very double-edged sword.

I love what we're doing,

but there's always a drive to do,

or to kind of get other people to do that as well,

so that we are talking about a real level playing field,

because I think that's what the internet can provide,

is a place where people can actually engage

in a number of different ways to get to the same content

and get an enjoyable experience online

and then choose what they want.

That's the goal for me.

So, yeah.

- And so in the work that you're doing now,

kind of, what's a day in the life or the week in the life

related to a accessibility?

What are some of the topics or tasks that come up

that you get involved with?

- It's a good question.

Well, I mean, so,

a big one is always still education, right?

We were always growing as a company,

and unfortunately, in the same way that I didn't kind of

come here packaged with a lot of accessibility knowledge,

we get a lot of people that still don't.

And so there's always a worry

of kind of creating an accessible website,

leaving it to other developers

and it accidentally slowly but surely becoming inaccessible

if you're not checking it in the same way

and making sure that it's upholding the same standards

that you set initially.

So sharing that information with as many people as I can

across the business,

helping people understand that making testing

not just kind of functional

or kind of coding end to end testing be thing,

but actual accessibility testing.

There are some fantastic tools that exist now

for devs are non-devs.

You know, you can do it from a Chrome browser,

you know, basic things like the wave checking

and lighthouse checking, which is great

and a lovely thing for a designer

to check their color contrast themselves,

or a product manager to check, you know,

what's something sounds like on a screen reader,

that is lovely to see,

and then some kind of continuous deployment checks

so that they run on new pieces of code

and make sure you haven't introduced anything

that's inaccessible.

That's a big thing for me,

is kind of making sure as my team grows,

that they will share that passion and have that knowledge

so that they're not even inadvertently

making the site less accessible than it was.

So I think teaching is a big, big part of that.

Talking to other parts of the business.

So we have more and more clients working with us

based on the things that we have done,

you know, the products we've built

and us extending to different parts of the world,

which is great, but offers another kind of opportunity

to chat to people initially.

You know, that having the chance to work with Octopus Energy

involves accessibility right from the start.

So when people come to visit us,

you know, we talk about the benefits of the system

and the operating model and the technology and that's great,

but oh, you know, also these things are accessible.

You know, you can make sure, you know,

we don't know about the current tools that you're using,

but you know, respectfully, there's a good chance

they might not be accessible.

You're dealing with something right out of the box

where not only can your customers engage with it

if they have access needs or disabilities,

but the people that work for you,

if they have access needs or disabilities

can work with the system, you know,

can do something like that.

So we're as focused on making sure

that they can work with us as a company

and do work from there, you know,

to be a true equal opportunity employer

to actually allow people to use our systems,

not just make the content

that we're putting online accessible, right?

So I think it's a mixture of advocacy,

a mixture of teaching,

a mixture of kind of forever learning as well.

You know, we've got this new kind of third version

of WCAG that's coming out

and understanding that looks like.

I really like that there is a whole different aspect of that

that focuses entirely on proper user testing,

because of course, you know,

these automated tests can get us to a certain point,

but actually engaging with people

and having them test your products,

there's no substitute for it, as you well know anyway.

So I love that there is something in there,

where you can't just run a test

and the test says you're accessible

and therefore you're accessible, and that's great.

You get a big tick there, everything's great.

You sit down with someone and say,

hey, you know, that might seem like it's totally accessible,

but if you actually, if you listen to this,

or if you actually go through in this way,

there are some fundamental flaws with it.

So I'm a big fan of that.

So keeping an eye on what's moving forward,

but teaching everybody what they might not know

when they first join

or when they first start to work with us,

I'd say that is probably not a week,

that's a multi-member job anyway,

like an ongoing job that probably never ends,

but that's where my huge focus is at the moment

with accessibility.

- I mentioned your book at the start of our conversation,

Practical Web Inclusion and Accessibility.

I have written a few books.

I know that it's a large commitment

to decide to get into something like that,

but what was it for you?

How did you decide you were going to sit down

and put in the time to work through something like that?

- Well, I mean, first of all,

if you've done a number of books,

you are a far braver man than I am.

One was quite the task.

So doing multiple is incredibly impressive.

I think it naturally evolved for me.

I started writing for a couple of magazines,

just to kind of get some tutorials out there

and say, hey, maybe you could check out this,

you know, there's this technology that's come about.

You should probably have a look to see

whether your sites are inclusive.

And that grew to features

where I was kind of writing more about an opinion

on the state of it at the time

and how that perhaps there isn't as much emphasis

as they should be.

And then as we kind of mentioned a little bit before,

starting to talk to people with different disciplines

that maybe weren't into web development,

but didn't really know about accessibility.

And I gave a talk at a conference in the UK

called the Festival of Marketing,

which is notoriously not a dev conference, right?

It's filled with product and project managers

and, you know, various designers and things like that.

And I got up and spoke for an hour

about the fundamentals of accessibility,

but had to do so in a way for a totally different audience,

an audience I'd never spoken to before.

It made me question how to approach this whole topic,

but to do it in a way that was engaging.

And so people would come afterwards and ask questions.

They'd be like, okay, I kind of know where I can get into,

and this is actually really fascinating.

You know, this is an excellent challenge,

because it is, it's a fascinating topic.

There's so much to get into and so much to learn

by getting involved with accessibility.

So after doing that talk,

I ended up speaking to a publisher,

and they said, there isn't a book out here

that's doing that at the moment.

It ended up being twice as big as I'd hoped it would be,

because most like the topic,

it just kind of kept going and kept going,

but they were totally okay with that.

And so I did that around my job.

Took about 10, 11 months to do.

It was an incredibly grueling affair,

to be honest with you,

like to kind of put all that together.

And I'm very thankful to Octopus, where I work,

for supporting that really,

in the essence of like understanding

that my brain would be in two places

for a little bit of time.

And I'm incredibly proud that it exists.

The title was a bit of a mouthful,

but I understand why the publisher would want it

to be a bit of a mouthful,

because there's a lot about inclusivity

and accessibility in there,

but it now acts as this kind of conversation topic.

As we kind of mentioned with all of the different companies,

it is now something that a CEO of another company

can pick up and start to read to understand the concept,

a designer that comes to visit,

you know, a person that comes to interview Greg

will end up talking about accessibility.

Conversations that just wouldn't happen before, you know.

Just no one would get onto that topic

perhaps initially or organically, but it's there

and it starts to bring it into the fold every time.

And so every time someone visits, they join

and I'll happily talk about it for hours and hours,

so that's no problem at all.

So that is how it came about.

That is why it exists now.

And the response to it has been lovely.

It's really nice to see people get into the topic

for the first time through what you've written down.

It is by no means a finished article,

because it's always a constant thing, right?

It's always evolving,

but from that point in time,

giving someone a starter and a basis, I'm very proud of it.

I'm proud that it exists.

- Yeah, well, congratulations on doing that

and contributing to the knowledge share in this area.

And yeah, I think about accessibility

as an iterative activity myself.

There are just so much out there,

but if you get frozen,

it's better to just pick some place to start.

- Yeah, absolutely, couldn't agree more.

- Everything we do is an improvement for somebody,

which is one of the kind of enjoyable parts

of this activity, I think. - Absolutely.

- Well, thanks for taking this time

to chat with me for this.

And I'm sure everybody listening and watching this

will appreciate it as well.

And good luck in all of the rest

of your accessibility efforts.

- Oh, thank you so much.

It's been a real pleasure.