Dani Devesa Derksen-Staats, former iOS Accessibility Engineer at Spotify, The Times, The BBC and SkyScanner Joins Joe to discuss all things Mobile and iOS Accessibility.

We discuss his own experience within the field of Mobile and Digital Accessibility and general iOS Development, how all developers and engineers can make a small change to their thinking to make a huge impact, and discussing the mentality of Progress over Perfection and how we need to make mistakes to learn from them and improve.

Resource Links:

• Dani's personal Website: www.dadederk.com
• Developing Accessible iOS Apps Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Developing-Accessible-iOS-Apps-VoiceOver/dp/1484253078
• PCR Digital, Digital and Technology Recruitment: https://www.pcrdigital.com/

Joe's Social Media Links:

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

Dani's Social Media Links:

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danieldevesa
• X (Formerly Twitter): @dadederk
• Medium: medium.com/@dadederk  

Welcome to the digital Accessibility podcast, hosted by me, Joe James, and

sponsored by PCR Digital, who provide people centric recruitment. Throughout this

series, I'll be interviewing advocates, experts and practitioners of digital

accessibility to help raise awareness for the work that they do and discuss

the role digital accessibility has in all of our lives. I hope that you

find value in these discussions and are inspired to join the journey towards a

more accessible digital world. So sit back, relax, and I hope you enjoy

the chat!

Today I'm joined by Daniel Devesa Derksen-Staats,

Ex-Senior Accessibility iOS engineer at Spotify,

author of "Developing Accessible iOS apps", prolific tweeter and overall accessibility

advocate. Dani's just about to start a very exciting new venture with one of

the world's largest tech companies. We're not actually able to disclose who has

snapped Danny up at the time of recording, but if you follow him on

LinkedIn or X, formerly Twitter, then you will be sure to find out!

Dani's had an amazing career, firstly working as a research fellow on augmented reality

tools and interactive catalogues for the University of Valencia, moving on to work

as an iOS developer and engineer for some of the largest companies out there.

So you've got the BBC, the Times, Skyscanner and most recently Spotify. He's

been on a mission since global Accessibility Awareness Day '22 to tweet

365 days of accessibility, helping to raise awareness for mobile and iOS

accessibility. So I'm going to stop there. It's quite a long intro, but welcome

to the podcast, Dani.

Hey, yeah, thank you so much. I'm so happy to finally be here and

have the chance to sit down and talk a little bit about accessibility with

you and I really appreciate you inviting me and I'm looking forward to it.

You're more than welcome. I'm very excited. We had a quick chat just

before and I've let you know that you were actually my inspiration for

getting started with this podcast back in 2022. It took some doing, but

yeah, I saw that you started your journey on the 365 days of accessibility

to raise awareness and I thought, well, what could I do to help? It's

such an important field. I'd love to do my bit as well. So we've

had seven successful episodes so far. Absolutely honoured that you're finally

here as well, and we've got the opportunity to do this, I guess. Could

you just tell us a bit more about your decision to start posting those

tweets and slides since then?

Yeah, and first, congrats for the podcast. I'm really enjoying it so far. Every

time I hear that I've been an inspiration. It's just mind blowing. If

it's real and it fills my heart with joy. So I really appreciate your

kind words. And I guess that was my hope actually, when I started, but

I did not have any expectations. So I thought that the greatest thing about

working in accessibility is that everything you do has a great positive

impact. But it was limited to the projects I was working on. So I

thought that by sharing some of the things I knew or some of the

tricks I knew, hopefully someone out there would pick it up and apply

those things to the projects as well. And I saw that as hopefully a

way of making a higher impact, hopefully creating this snowball effect

that more and more people would learn about accessibility and apply those

concepts to the projects. But it was a mix of things that inspired me

to do this. There was global accessibility awareness day, and Jennison Asuncion,

one of the co founders, I think presenting their foundation, said

something like, we should go from one day of awareness to a year of

action. So that's why I want to do like a whole year of tweets.

But then so many people that have been advocating for Accessibility and I've

learned so much from like Sally shepherd or Sommer Panage is one of my

idols. I've learned so much from them. So I thought it would be very

cool to give back a bit of what I learned from them. Or Paul

Hudson in the iOS community is very well known for 100 days of swift,

and I saw that that format of little chunks of information that you

could consume daily could work really well. So I started one day, had

like a 220 day strike, more or less. I'm very happy about it,

but sad that I could not continue, but I'm really hoping to finish them

one day.

Yeah, absolutely. Well that's the thing. By that logic of one day of

awareness, you're hopefully going to have created 365 years of action by

the end of that. So it's incredible and it's such a huge undertaking because

obviously that's not the only thing that you've had to focus on throughout the

last couple of years. And they're so detailed, they're really great. And the

visual that you put towards all of that as well, I think people can

appreciate the effort that goes into that. I couldn't believe you were already

keeping up doing it. So I think you should be very proud of what

you've done there. And yeah, it'd be great to see that finished and maybe

you could have a little book, a flick book of each day. 365 I

guess you've done the author's part of things as well, so you've got your

book out there. I haven't actually got a question based around that, but

hopefully we can draw some inspiration from what you've written in your book

as well. But yeah, great achievement.

Thank you.

And you've also again worked with some incredible companies over the last sort of

ten plus years, which is quite a long period of time. I'm not trying

to age you or anything, but time has probably flown over ten years, but

you must have seen still a huge amount of change when it comes to

what's available in accessibility within the iOS and general mobile space through

that time. Are there any standout improvements or could you let us know

some of the largest improvements that you've seen over the years?

Yeah, absolutely. To start with, when I started my career, I think I didn't

even know what accessibility was. I studied a five year degree, computer

science degree, and I was not the best of students. But I'm pretty

sure I never heard anything about accessibility, which is very

disappointing. And I'm happy that that's something that seems to be changing now.

But for example, the first iPhone, and not many people know that was not

accessible. If you think about it, it was a flat sheet glass, no keyboard,

barely any buttons. Voiceover was not available in the first version. It took

a couple more years for Apple to do that. There's an audio documentary

called 36 seconds that changed everything. That I really, really recommend that tells

that story isn't a criticism to Apple. I don't know what were the reasons

why that happened. And we know that the story has a happy ending. So

when the iPhone three 3GS was released, they presented the first accessibility

settings screen with voiceover and zoom. And it really is outstanding. I think

Apple's progression over the last few years, they kept improving and every

single year they released a new tool, API, feature. So switch control came over,

which is like the possibility of using the iPhone with as little as a

single switch or button, then voice control. That feels pretty magical, like

the first time you use it and how much you can achieve with it

as well. Then full keyboard access, the possibility of using the phone with a

physical keyboard as well, and a tonne of tools for developers. So now we

have the possibility, for example to implement graphs that are represented with

audio. So a voiceover user can hear sound that changes in pit depending on

the X axis value and then they can identify trends, right? Are those

values going up or down? Or up and down. So that's very cool. And

lately, I think Apple is just being brilliant at every single year, releasing

again features that feel like magic. So I think usually now they're presenting

them around global Accessibility Awareness day, which is quite cool. And 2022,

they released something called Assisted Touch for the Apple Watch. And it's

the possibility of using the watch just with the hand where you're wearing your

watch, so you can do things like it will show a cursor around one

of the elements in the UI, and you can do a single pinch to

go forward, double pinch to go backwards, fist clench to select it. So

no more need to use your nose to see the notifications or anything if

you're carrying a bag in the other hand or something. So that's pretty cool.

Or they presented something where you can use your phone to detect doors, and

it would say, do you have to push? Do you have to pull? Are

there any signs outside of the door? So I think that's pretty cool. And

in 2023, they presented something called personal voice, where you can do a

few recordings of a voice, and that's meant for people that are at risk

of losing their voice, and then it creates a synthetic voice that sounds like

you. So in the future, if you lose your voice, you can keep using

your voice. I think that's brilliant as well. Or

the same feature that detects doors now, you can point at things where you

think there's text in it, and it will read that text for you. So

in case you cannot see it properly or something, the phone will let you

know what you're pointing at. And now they're releasing this month the Vision Pro.

So they had a video about it in WWDC, Apple's

Worldwide Developers Conference, about how accessible it is. There's lots of

challenges, right, with augmented reality and virtual reality, but I think they're

nailing it. Not to say that they find challenges, for sure, and I'm just

looking forward to see how they tackle them.

Yeah, I mean, so much. And that's just one company as well. They're

releasing all of those things. And I think just to touch on that point,

I know you've got a couple of other things to mention there, but when

you mentioned about the personal voice, I think there was a really moving advert

that they put out at the time as well when they were announcing that.

And there's so many different scenarios where that could be used,

even if you're losing your own voice. But then I'm imagining future of AI,

and if you can implement that within a virtual avatar, and then those of

us that unfortunately are no longer here, you would still be able to hear

and see your loved ones. There's challenges with that in itself as well.

And I think with data and GDPR and your own image and things, I

think that that's another set of challenges. But, yeah, it was a really

moving thing and so nice to see something like that being put together.

Yeah, I really recommend watching that. It's really amazing. I think those are

great examples when a company takes accessibility beyond compliance and they

want really to serve the user and to think, like, what do they need

from us? What can we do for them? And that's awesome.

Absolutely, yeah. And then wider reaching, sort of like within the industry.

You sent me some notes, which is great. You mentioned that you're seeing

that companies are having more accessibility champion networks and things

like that as well?

Yeah, I was lucky that I worked for a few startups and then I

joined the BBC. So the BBC, I think, had probably the

first accessibility championship network in the industry. And there was a

great culture around accessibility. It's the first place where maybe had to get

had some specifications about accessibility or a design had some

annotations or something I worked on was failed by a QA because it wouldn't

work properly with Voiceover. And it was really the first time where I started

working, doing things more accessible and learning about accessibility. And the

first thing I thought is, why is this not a thing everywhere? Why does

it feel like a special thing here at the BBC? But I've been lucky

that since then I worked for other companies where accessibility has been

really important. I joined SkyScanner, for example, and they were

starting a great accessibility network. Heather (Hepburn) has been doing a

brilliant job there. It was amazing to see

how much they accomplished with little resources, just by getting some people

that were passionate about it together and talking about it and seeing how they

could do more. And then I joined Spotify and the same, like when I

joined, there was no accessibility team, but we had an accessibility guild it was

called back then, same thing. It was just people that were at the company

that were passionate about it and we were trying to see how we could

make accessibility more important, or at least for our colleagues to be more

aware of it and things like that. And you can see how they thought

it was really important because they actually decided to create a specific team

for being focused in accessibility. And I'm super happy. That's something that you

kind of see more and more in the industry as well. Slack, for example,

has an accessibility team as well. Twitter used to have an amazing one before

someone with touch of money decided that. Yeah.

So, yeah, but that's another story.

I'm just wondering if I can tweet or would you call them tweets now?

Are they called X's? What is. But, yeah, I'll skate around that one.

Exactly. No, but I wanted to mention the Twitter example, for example, because

they set up the bar really high to the point that not

users with that user accessibility or assistive technologies, but every single

user, even main media, expect now for every single

major piece of software to have to meet those standards. And there was a

clear example when Facebook launched threads, they were not supporting alt text

for images. And again, no criticism.

I've learned my lesson as well, that you don't know what was happening in

the team, like how they were putting things. But I think the great news

is; everyone demanded from them to implement it as soon as possible, and

they pointed out that it was not right. So two years ago, no

social network was allowing for users to add alt text to images. Now Twitter

does, LinkedIn does, Threads does, Slack does. So it's amazing to see that

we are in the right direction. It's taking a lot of effort and time,

but we were getting there.

Yeah, I think that it's good to see that the option is there as

well for everyone now and the users of those types of platforms, because it's

a strange world that we live in now. I think ten years, again, is

a long period of time, but it goes so quickly, and now everyone has

the world at their fingertips. You're able to create content and put it out

there, but if the option isn't even available for you to make that accessible,

then you're excluding such a large portion of people that may have interacted with

your media or your content. So just by implementing that as a possibility,

you're giving the user the opportunity to make the difference themselves as well,

which is. Yeah, it's just brilliant to see that that's happening now. Yeah,

exactly.

I think captions are great examples where how maybe initially people were paying

attention to them for deaf users or hard of hearing users, but how Gen X

is big fan of subtitles and captions now, and how we use more and

more often, or devices in places where it's noisy or we don't have our

headphones and without those we can consume the content either.

Absolutely. And unfortunately, I'm not a member of Gen X because I'm over

30 now, but I've always just had to use captions. I think that,

strangely, I've got relatively good hearing. However, I just find it that

I can focus a lot better when I have the option of captions there.

Yeah, follow along conversations. So, yeah, it's good. Brilliant. So moving on

to the next sort of question I'd like to ask would be around within

your roles. From what I've seen and what we've discussed, you seem to always

have that evangelist kind of hat on, but you remain very much hands on

in terms of the actual physical development for iOS. So do you feel

that you can implement the most amount of positive change from that position,

being hands on, being technical within a company, or is it just. That's the

way it's kind of worked out?

Yeah, it's a mix of both things. And the interesting point is to find

the right balance, i guess. When I started working full time in

accessibility, my first reaction was to jump and try to fix every single

issue I found. But that's just not sustainable long term for many reasons,

like you cannot do everything yourself, you may have to fix a piece

of software that someone else has worked on and therefore you don't really know

what some other people do. So they're mostly able to fix those things with your help,

hopefully. So I find that the advocacy and educational aspect of the

role is super important. It's extremely important. The more people you can teach

the better. And if you can transmit your passion for it,

for people to understand how important it is, that's the key. So I find

pretty important to work, for example, a lot with designers because most features

start in the design process and that's like the earlier you start the better.

Right? But the more designers that know about accessibility, the more they are

going to take certain considerations that are going to make it so engineers

cannot even make it not accessible in a way, or they may be able

to add some annotations to it as well. But I think it's also super

important to keep being hands on as well. Stay close to the code so

you can feel what the pain points other developers are finding to keep

learning as well. Because as we mentioned, for example, in iOS, Apple releases new,

new things every year. So to be able to do things yourself

from time to time as well keeps you learning those new things.

Yeah, I think sometimes as well, because of your role being focused in

accessibility, there are certain problems that might be required a bit more

specialised knowledge. Another thing is you cannot pretend that everyone is an

expert in accessibility. What we say as well is most of the issues you

find out there are really simple things that everyone can know and fix, but

obviously there's some things that will require some more advanced or specialised

solutions to it. And for those cases, I think it's very good to have

someone with the knowledge in-house to be able to do those things.

Yeah, absolutely. And that brings you back full circle, I suppose, because you can't

be expected to do everything yourself. I think the problem is there is a

lot of that expectation within the industry or within the community of

accessibility, that one specialist can fix everything and that just creates a huge

amount of burnout. It undervalues the importance of the role and I think

then you're just spread way too thinly and then are you really going to

be making the best positive amount of contribution that you could have done if

you focused on smaller chunks and gained that advocacy from other people? So, yeah,

I agree. I think that balance is great and you seem to have that

down to quite a fine art. So, yeah, it's good to see leading by

example, hopefully.

100%. I was in Accessibility Toronto, a couple of years ago and I was

starting to find that one of the common themes from most like, or lots of the

talks was burnout in the industry precisely because of what you said, like

little resources, a lot is expected from you. And I think, as well, because people

working in accessibility are really passionate about it, so you really try

to give your best. You need to see that people are on board with

you in that journey.

Yeah. And I think, again, what you've mentioned about staying close to the code

so that you've got a relevant viewpoint from what a developer would see.

So I'm trying to put together a bit of a post or a bit

of content around the similarities between the cyber and information security sort of

boom of a few years ago or sort of 5-10 years ago, and accessibility

now because of the regulation change, because of the awareness that's growing.

But back then a lot of people were seeing cyber and information security

as this team that came in to stop you developing as a blockade. No,

you can't continue until you do X, Y or Z, but unfortunately, I think

there are developers, development teams or even senior stakeholders that see

accessibility as one of those things. They want the minimum viable product, that's

what they're going for. And everything is fast and agile. We just need something

out there, we need a product that people are using rather than we need

to make it available to a larger chunk of the community. So I'm really

going to try and pin those nuances a bit better. And cyber is

ingrained now you've got things like DevSecOps, so why can't we have

DevAccessibilityOps?

Yeah. I always explain the example of when I started my career as a

software engineer, I found that we were struggling to sell the idea of automated

testing and how the arguments we had for it are the same that we

are having for accessibility. I find it interesting that somehow automated testing

has become part of the culture of software engineering. It's expected for you

to know about it. Every single job posting mentions it, every single

interview is going to ask about it, but somehow we haven't got there with

accessibility. What I always say as well is, as engineers, our main goal is

to make software that works, and if it's not accessible, it's not working for

a lot of people. So we fail to do what we were supposed to

do.

Absolutely. Yeah. We need to get to that end goal, at least. Brilliant.

So when it comes to, like you say, the job specs and finding new

people within this space, or hiring other engineers and designers or members of

accessibility guilds or teams... In previous roles, have you had any involvement or

do you have any advice of what you think the right person would look

like in terms of what they've written on a CV or what they've achieved?

Yeah, I've been involved sometimes in hiring processes, and I think

the difficult thing to know is what you said to define really well what

the job is going to be and what is going to be expected from

that person. Very often you see job postings for accessibility roles that

could be two or three different roles, and also to have the right kind

of expectations of what people can you find. So as an example of mobile

engineering, right. If you're finding someone that knows a lot about iOS

development and accessibility, and that's what you need, and you can find

someone perfect, like you hit jackpot! But a lot of times I think it's

more real, or you can start that way and see if you can find

someone. But I think a lot of times it's more realistic to think, would

it work better finding someone that is a really good iOS engineer with a

passion for accessibility, even if it's not a specialist that we can upskill,

that we can give them room to learn about it, teach them what's

necessary to hopefully bring that person to the level we need, or the

other way around. Do we know someone that is an accessibility specialist and

doesn't know much about is development that is willing to learn? Always wanted

to know more about iOS development. We have lots of iOS developers in the

company... Can we get that person and

teach them what the person will need to do? The job. And I think that's

sometimes like a better strategy probably, and something that not a lot of

times companies consider.

I think you're right. And another thing that I'm trying to get together as

someone that's trying to help with the recruitment in the space is avenues of

roles for people. So rather than it just being you're an Accessibility

Specialist and that job description is as long as a piece of string because

you've got every single requirement, every web accessibility bit of knowledge, even

web development, so you're looking at HTML, CSS, Javascript, all the new modern

frameworks and they're saying oh, but we have mobile products as well. So they

need to know Swift, they need to know Java or Kotlin for Android. And

again it just goes on and on. So I'm trying to say you can

have people that focus on accessibility, that have the technical, people that have

the strategy and the general programme and project management around that, and

awareness, even the culture change could go into that section. So to split

them out rather than just yeah, you're a specialist so you should be able

to do absolutely everything. I think that's the unfortunate expectation at the

moment. Yeah, you're right. I think a lot of that onus is on me

now, I think, because I'm trying to be THE guy for accessibility recruitment.

So yeah, I can always use as much help as possible. I listen to

all the feedback from people and I think that leads on to sort of

salaries and expectations and recompensation and things in that regard

as well. So unfortunately when it's an unknown to people that

are holding the purse strings or giving the budget for new areas of exploration

within a company, they're not going to give you what you want. So it

is tricky, but I think that the tide will turn as soon as we

get more movement in that space. Brilliant, I guess. What's your experience

been of the sort of job hunting and interview process throughout your

career? Is there anything that you've done personally to ensure that you're moving

into another accessibility focused role as an iOS developer, and engineer? Or have

you sort of gone for iOS engineer roles with you've got a feeling that

you could probably advocate for that and then include that as an extracurricular

kind of thing that you do when you join?

Yeah, it's been more like that, I think. As I mentioned, I started learning

a lot about accessibility at the BBC and I tried to get more and

more involved with the champions network there. And then when I moved to

Skyscanner, one of the first things I tried to see is what is being

done around accessibility here and then I joined the champions network that they had

there. And I think that's the good thing as well. When you start in

a company and you have that bit of knowledge that is not extended to

everyone, is unfortunately still rare,

you tend to gain more and more responsibilities and be more and more

involved in helping to change the culture around accessibility and to help other

teams and not just yours. And things like that are actually, I think, very

important for career development. So in lots of big companies, you're going to

be asked in order to progress, to have a bigger impact than just your

team, but help other teams and do improvements that

are cross company and not just focusing your little area of what you own.

And when I joined Spotify, same thing I joined with no expectations. I actually

didn't know the project I was going to start working on. They said it

was something new and secret. So I just found out when I was going

to start and it was the Spotify Kids app and it was a super

fun project to be involved with and same thing. I just tried to find

the people that were passing the door accessibility in the company and

eventually the team was created and because of the work I had been

doing in the guild, they thought of me as someone that could join the

team and I'm super grateful for that. I think it was very special to

be able to join a team that is completely focused on accessibility.

But I think other people that, for example, can influence and something I try

to do in the companies I worked before as well, like hiring processes. If

you can, for example, add questions about accessibility in the pool of questions

that you ask to candidates, I think that's brilliant. As we know, lots of

people may not know the answer to those questions, but I think it works

really well as a statement of it's important to us. So the person, if

it's successful and joins the company, will think, they asked me about

accessibility, so it's surely something important in this company. And more

importantly, if you can influence what are the requirements in job descriptions as

well. If you can add accessibility there, then the candidates will prepare for it

before they get to interview. And again, it's a statement of it's important

here. Automated testing is important, Accessibility is as important as well.

It's brilliant. Yeah, I agree. I think the only issue with that from my

perspective is adding anything else to job specs already. I think people are going

to go, oh God, you want me that have that as well. But I

guess if it's a nice to have. Or just to mention, again, it's just

showing the dedication to growth in that field or

offering that opportunity of something beyond the day to day job that

you're being hired to do. And again, career progression. If you've got that

passion and you want to grow in your career and not just keep doing

the same thing, then this is an amazing and very rewarding avenue to take.

So yeah, I agree. So I'm going to go on to a little bit

more of a techie sort of side of things, which hopefully you'll enjoy. I

was having a think about a lot of the issues that we do see

within mobile and digital accessibility in general, and thinking they're not

necessarily all just from an ignorance or unawareness standpoint in terms of

excluding users. I think a lot of it is unintentional, but I think that

sometimes it is just that we didn't have the tools or the knowledge that

we do now, so that a lot of legacy platforms and tech or

applications have been developed in that time period without the consideration for

things like VoiceOver, switch controls and any of the other sort of assistive

tech. And then because of that, it becomes 20 to 30 times more expensive

to put it right because they're already active products that people are using.

So I don't mean for you to solve everything right now on the podcast,

it'd be great if you did. But do you have a vision for how

we would overcome this issue? Or is it just we need to just scrap

everything and start developing again with accessibility in mind? Or could we

automate that and streamline in a more streamlined solution to ensure that we're

getting the overhaul sort of done and those legacy apps that are still long

standing and needed are going to be able to become more accessible.

I think it's a super interesting project topic

in the mobile world, especially iOS and Android. I think the best tip I

can give anyone is use native components, if you can. So native components are

the components for building UIs that in the case of iOS, Apple provides you.

It could be labels, buttons, text fields, things as simple as that, but also

colours and more complicated components like colour pickers or date pickers,

things like that. And obviously sometimes you need something that

didn't provide or to add functionality they don't give. But I'm saying that

because actually the first time I remember hearing the term

accessibility was when I was working at a really small startup called Bananity in

Barcelona and I was the sole mobile developer doing both iOS and Android apps.

And just to make my life easy. I decided to use native components out

of the box, customise them as little as possible. And then one user thanked

us in the App Store for making the app accessible. And I was like,

what? I haven't done anything. Let me check this out. And then I found

that, yeah, you use native components. Apple is very good at making those

components accessible, so there's not much work you need to do. And I

find that, as you said, bigger and older projects tend to have a lack

of accessibility because maybe at the time they decided to implement components

themselves because they didn't exist yet, or the ones Apple provided didn't have the

functionality they needed. An example could be there's a component in iOS

called collection view that is a way of drawing very complicated layouts like

Bridge, or if you think about the Pinterest kind of layout where there's

columns that have different heights and things like that, you could do something

like that with a collection view, but that's a component that didn't exist. When

iOS development started and when Apple started providing it, it was not very

performant. So a lot of teams would decide to make those components

themselves. The problem with that is you need to think about accessibility. And if

you don't, then there's a problem. For example, now when Apple introduced dynamic

type, or the possibility to increase the text size, if you didn't consider that

for your collection view, then the layout would start to break and things like

that. But what I like to say in this sort of projects, big projects,

is I like the Boy Scout rule. So always leave the campground cleaner

than you found it. And in the accessibility world, we like to say

progress over perfection. So just when you have to do something new, or go

and fix a bug, just have a look around and see what you can

improve. A lot of times I hear people saying, what's the point of making

this screen accessible if the rest of the app isn't? But you have to

start somewhere and users will value that and it will set a precedent, it

will set an example for everyone else. And it's just a way of starting.

I think a few years ago, every single project in iOS was Objective-C

and Apple introduced Swift for example, today most projects are UIKit and Apple

introduced SwiftUI. And now teams are trying to see how they can migrate.

And in most projects, what happened is if I have to write something new,

I make sure it's in Swift or SwiftUI or is accessible. In this case,

if I need to fix a bug, then maybe I change this piece of

code to Swift or SwiftUI. So I think that's a good approach, just little

by little, and it takes time, but you'll get there.

Absolutely, yeah. And it can be done. You've proven that. I think it's just

the commitment, I think, as well, is the big part. But brilliant. I mean,

you've already taught us so much in this short space of time. But the

final question that I always ask on these episodes is, what do you believe

is the simplest and most cost effective way that someone can implement more

digital accessibility within their own line of work? Is there anything in

particular? Or would you say what you've just said kind of covers a lot

of that?

Yeah. I'm a big fan of Ted Lasso, and there's a quote that I

don't remember. He says a quote from someone, I don't remember who that was,

but it is: "Be curious, not Judgemental." So I think that's the key, is to

ask yourself questions. Most issues that you see

are repeated over and over and they're not difficult to fix at all. You

see missing labels, you see colour contrast issues, you see buttons that are

too small, things like that. So if you ask yourself questions like, what

happens if my user cannot see the screen? Or what happens if my user

does not differentiate colours? Or what happens if my user cannot hear or

cannot touch the screen? Then you start being in that mindset of thinking,

how do I make this accessible? And not being judgmental, not making

assumptions of how your users may use your app. I think,

for example, I assume back in the day, maybe blind users don't use the

camera app, for example. And that's far from true. It's one of the apps

that a lot of them use the most. I think be curious there. Ask

yourself questions and not being judgmental, not making assumptions.

I like, again, the example of the Threads app. I think we have to

approach accessibility with kindness as well. And I need to remind myself

about that as well many times. They ended up implementing a text for images.

I've been involved in many apps, for example, where the reviews in the App

Store have been the opposite. It's been like, is there anyone working in accessibility

in this app? And you are working in accessibility? Not just you, but a

lot of people. But we fail as well. Sometimes things may regress.

You do your best and, yeah, progress over perfection, I think, is

the thing that everyone should keep in mind.

Definitely. And I think that kindness needs to extend further, always. I think

that you probably get a lot of people thinking, are you even doing

anything? And you think, oh my God, there's only a certain amount of hours

in the day. There's only a certain amount of things that I can actually

focus on at one given time and your mental health and your work life

balance and everything that goes behind you, the human that's trying to make

a difference. If you're going to pile on even more pressure as a user

that thinks nothing's being done, it's just going to make things worse. So

I think we need that acceptance of we're trying, but it's going to take

some time to get there, but also we need to shout out about it

more like you're doing. So I think that it's just, look, we're aware we're

trying to do X, Y and Z and holding our hands up. I think

that Chris Patnoe said that when we were visiting the ADC, the Accessibility

Discovery Centre in Google's offices in London, and he just said, look, we're

not perfect. We are going to make mistakes and if anything, it's the best

thing we can do because then that will highlight more issues that we need

to focus on or do better in the future. So I think trying to

be perfect is a pointless exercise. So I completely agree and I think that

what you've just shared there is a profound and apt sort of way to

bring the episode to a close Dani. So, thank you so much for joining

me and for just all the friendship and advice that you've given to me

over the years that we've sort of known each other online and I just

hope that we can stay in touch. You've had a huge, huge impact and

positive impact on so many people with your tweets, your book. A lot of

the people that I hire for other companies have mentioned your work as

well. So I hope that you understand how much you're giving back to the

community. So it's just been a pleasure to get to know you over the

years and yeah, hope that we can stay in touch moving forward as well.

Same. Yeah, I really hope so. Thank you so much for everything. I really

enjoyed it and I'm looking forward for more episodes of the podcast as well.

Thank you so much. Yeah, hopefully we'll do some more group sessions or something

as well, and you can be a part of that. But thanks for joining

me this time and yeah, I'll see you all on the next one!

Thankyou.