A new episode of The Digital Accessibility Podcast featuring Craig Abbott, former Head of Accessibility at DWP and Design Lead at Elastic. We discuss his own experience within the field of Accessibility. Experiencing burn-out and what he may have done differently, imposter syndrome when working with guidelines rather than regulations and provides general insight and advice when thinking about hiring the right people and the general recruitment process within Digital Accessibility.

Resource Links:

• Elastic: https://www.elastic.co/
• PCR Digital, Digital and Technology Recruitment: https://www.pcrdigital.com/

Joe's Social Media Links:

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

Craig's Social Media Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbott567/
• Twitter: @Abbott567
• Instagram: @Abbott567

Hi, and welcome to the Digital Accessibility Podcast.

With me, your host, Joe James. Throughout this series, I will be

interviewing professionals who work within the space to share their expertise,

journeys and general thoughts on the key issues facing the industry today.

My aim is to provide an indepth look into the world of digital

accessibility and the impact it has on the lives of anyone who interacts with

digital technology. Our goal is to bridge the skills

gap in the current market and inspire others 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 in this

extremely important community.

Today.

I'm joined by Craig Abbott, previous head of accessibility at the Department for

Work and Pensions and now Senior Designer working with Elastic.

Elastic help organisations, their employees and customers scale mountains of

data with their powerful analytics and visualisation tools.

Craig had a fruitful career starting out in design and development, moving into

accessibility leadership and going full circle into the Senior Designer role again to

ensure accessibility is considered at all stages of the software development

lifecycle. So, Craig, welcome to the podcast.

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Really looking forward to it. I think just before we start, I

should point out it's hay fever season, so I'm going to be rubbing my

eyes a lot and there's probably going to be a cat will appear at

some point, so I'm going to apologise.

For that. Just on the point of the allergies.

So I've actually got two cats as well, and I've always been allergic to

cats, but my fiance said she couldn't live in a house without cats, so

we compromised and got some cats. But, yeah, all good.

But, yes, I guess we'll dive in. I hope the intro was fairly accurate.

I know that you've recently moved roles, but I guess first question, what was

the motivation for that move?

Yeah, so I left DWP at the end of 2022.

I've been at Elastic for about.

Six months now, which seems like it's flew over really quickly, to be honest.

But, yeah, six months, the intro. Yeah, fairly accurate.

I mean, Elastic are predominantly a search company.

They've been known for search for the last, sort of ten years.

Elasticsearch is used on all sorts of stuff because it can search massive data

sets, kind of in real time, but they are working on a security product,

so that's what I work on. We're looking at being able to search

through massive amounts of data to kind of find cybersecurity threats and that

kind of thing. So they've only been in the search

sort of arena for the last few years.

The product is still quite new, but.

Yeah, that's what I'm working on. I think the main motivator for leaving

DWP in my last role as head of Accessibility, I think, if I'm totally

honest, it was just the stress. Like everyone that I know that's working in the

accessibility industry is burned out. I had worked for government for seven

years. I was the head of accessibility for

almost three, and it just got to

the point where I felt like it was the right time to move on.

I feel like I did a lot of good work there, but it got

to the point where I think the

organisation was starting to impact me more

than I felt like I could impact

the organisation, if that makes sense. So, yeah, I think it just felt

like the right time. It felt like somebody else needed to

come in and take over and have a renewed energy because I was just

really tired.

Yeah and that's it, the right time to move on, sort of thing.

You've done some amazing work there. I know you did make a huge

impact. I know you have, because I've spoken

to a lot of people that are aware of the work you've done.

But yeah, I know we spoke previously, before the show, about who's replaced you,

and it's someone that you've worked with and it's nice to sort of I

guess you've moved on and opened up that space for someone to come in.

Yeah. So Nikki Berry took on the role

after I left, and I was really pleased to see Nikki go into that

role. She's great.

She worked well, we worked together for about a year before I left, so

we originally hired her as Senior Accessibility Specialist, and then when I

left, she sort of stepped into my role.

But, yeah, I was really pleased to see Nikki get that.

She's great. I'd probably left a lot sooner if.

It wasn't for Nikki, to be honest.

Well, that's really good. And it's nice to know that it

feels like you've not just done all of that work and they just walked

away from it. I feel like, you'll know that, Nikki

will sort of look after what you've sort of put in place. Yeah. Amazing.

So, I mean, seven years, wow. Working within the public sector, I think

when you're pushing for change and you're really trying to sort of maybe bring

people up to date, that's enough to sort of make anyone go a bit

mad. I think it goes so slowly.

So how did you manage it? And you mentioned burnout, so you

obviously did experience that and that sort of frustration throughout your years

there.

Yeah. Think, in all honesty, I was just

in a perpetual state of burnout over the three years that I was in

that role. I think there was a definite bell curve

of impact, so to speak.

There was a lot of impact in a short amount of time, and then

I kind of peaked and I think towards sort of the last year or

so that kind of fell off. The impact definitely slowed down over

time. I think a lot of that is

probably my own doing.

I put myself out there a lot.

I'd kind of offered as much support as I could.

I was doing talks, workshops, we ran accessibility clinics.

I guess I felt the more that I showed that I was approachable, the

more stuff that I could help get over the line, the more things would

be accessible. But I guess it was probably a

bit naive in hindsight, because what actually happened was I just kind of

got crushed under the pressure. I mean, at one point I was

one person in an organisation of about 100,000 people, and everyone suddenly

thought that I had all the answers. So all the quick calls and, "Can

you just quickly have a look at this?"

And "Can we just quickly loop you into this thing that we're doing?"

Like, it all adds up. And I never wanted people to feel

like they didn't feel supported. I didn't want people to sort of

use it as an excuse and say, well, we reached out to the head

of role and we got no response or whatever.

So I kind of get pulled into calls and Cc'd into hundreds of emails

and sent documents and websites to review. And of course, it was always marked

as urgent because everyone leaves accessibility at the last minute.

So, yeah, I was pretty much just on back-to-back calls for my

entire working day. And then in the evenings, I was

having to do all of the actions off the back of those calls and

got to the point where I was pretty much averaging about 60 or 70

hours a week, which just isn't sustainable for everyone, for anyone, really.

So, yeah, I guess to answer your question, I'm not sure that I did

deal with the frustrations. I think I just kept going until

I couldn't anymore. So, yeah, I definitely don't recommend

people, do it the way that I did it.

It's hard to really sort of put my finger on it, but I think

it's when you've got that title, it almost added an additional amount of

pressure. There's already pressure involved because

you're the face of it within the organisation.

You're the Head of Accessibility, so you're the go to guy.

And you see that in the UK especially, I feel people I speak to

across the board, they are pretty much employing one person and then don't have

the budget or don't have the ability to grow their team out, to then

delegate that work, and then there will be more support.

So I guess it's just unfortunately, I feel that's the way that it's done

quite broadly across different sectors as well.

Yeah, I think I definitely took a lot of responsibility for stuff that

wasn't my responsibility. I kind of had this idea that

it would reflect badly on me as the head of accessibility, if a service

was out in the wild and it wasn't accessible.

So I guess in some cases, nobody else was really taking responsibility for

stuff. So I felt like I had to.

But you can't be responsible for everything in an organisation that large.

Again, in hindsight. No, exactly. And then within that, just to lump

this on top as well, because we're on the subject of that sort of

burnout, mental health and struggling through the role, we've spoken about

Impostor syndrome, me personally on the show before, but also just within the

accessibility profession. And did you get a sense of

that, because you had that head of role?

Yeah, Impostor syndrome all the time. Impostor Syndrome

is something I've talked about in the past.

My, I'm good friends with Gavin Elliott, who has toured the country, given talks on

Impostor syndrome.

It's really common, I think, in a.

Lot of digital roles. I think in accessibility, it was amplified

because it was so new, I think, in the department.

And it was something that, I was

a designer that sort of looked at accessibility.

I took it on in my spare time, but I was very much a

designer and I did talks on it.

And I did a whole bunch of stuff in my spare time to kind

of drive that agenda forward. I mean, suddenly I'd found myself in

this role where suddenly I was now responsible for all this stuff.

So I did kind of feel out of my depth quite a bit, I think

and I think a lot of the

burnout we just spoke of can probably be attributed to that impostor syndrome.

The fact that I always took on too much.

I think, as my role developed, what

became apparent was my responsibility was very much a strategic role.

It was form a strategy, educate, try and change the culture of the

organisation, hire the right people in to do that stuff.

And if I did all of that stuff, then compliance, I guess, should

have taken care of itself. But that's really slow.

So I guess I was doing all of that stuff.

But then on an evening, I was still kind of rolling my sleeves up

and doing accessibility audits and testing things with screen readers and writing

documentation and those sorts of things, because I guess I was worried if

there wasn't a noticeable improvement with me in that role.

Then I'd look incompetent,

or they wouldn't see the value in the role,

or they wouldn't see the value and accessibility.

So I guess there was this real.

Sense of urgency from me to try and prove the value of this, which,

when you've got that weight on your shoulders, the impostor does kind of perk

up and start saying some things.

I think another thing which is probably worth mentioning is like, the Web Content.

Accessibility Guidelines or "Wacag" or WCAG or whatever you want to call it,

captions.

Later, by the way, Craig. So thank you.

Spelling it out like that is going to be great for the captions.

Thank you for that.

Yeah, I mean, people call it all sorts.

I always call it "Wacag" and then some people don't know what I'm talking

about. WCAG, whatever you want to call it,

it is great. That is the takeaway point.

I fully believe in the guidelines and what they're for, but there are a

lot of grey areas in that. You can think something's a fail, somebody

else can disagree, and you have this back and forth and sometimes there's kind

of no right answer. A really good, I guess, real world

example is DWP had this service called 'Tell us Your patient is Terminally Ill',

I think it was called, but it allowed doctors to fast track patients

through the benefit system. So if you were terminally ill, obviously

every second matters and you get access to financial support quicker.

The form itself that they had to.

Fill in was called a DS 1500. I think it's called an SR 1

form now, but it was called a DS 1500 at the time.

Don't ask me what the acronyms mean, I've got no idea, which probably

highlights the problem. But, yeah, what happened with that

situation I guess to bring it back to

accessibility, the doctors knew this form as a DS 1500 and the NHS

called it a DS 1500 and the DWP staff called it a DS 1500.

But unless you had direct experience of a DS 1500, this is going to

be great for your captions later, it's going to be picking up all sorts.

But, yeah, it just didn't make any

sense unless you were in that industry. So, of course I did a work

WCAG review or an audit. I had zero kind of context as

that and I pulled it up because links and headings just said DS 1500.

And I said it didn't describe topic or purpose and there was a lot

of pushback. They were saying, well, actually, in our

research it shows that when we tried to change the name and say something

else like your patient is terminally ill form or something, people just didn't

understand what it was. They were looking for a DS 1500.

And, you know, that's that's perfectly valid.

Perfectly valid, I suppose, but I didn't have that context.

So of course people were saying, well, you failed this and it's not a

fail. And there's all of these sorts, so

you can find yourself in situations, I guess, where you doubt yourself, you think

you know WCAG, you think you know accessibility, and you just don't

always have the context.

And WCAG, by its very definition.

Is just guidelines and somehow it's become a legal standard and there's no right

or wrong answer sometimes and it can really be quite tricky.

That also, I think, affects impostor syndrome is when people are telling you

you're wrong and you can't really prove you're right.

But, yeah, for the record, I still think DS 1500 is a stupid, inaccessible

name for a form, but here we are.

I think everyone that listens to this will be in agreement with you, maybe not some doctors

that listen in, who knows! So from that perspective

is it that that was an internally used sort of acronym or code for

that particular form? Or would that be members of the

public that would have to ask for

that form to. So members of the public didn't touch it.

It was a form which the doctor filled in and then that came into

government and then kind of fast tracked through by being attached to somebody's

sort of benefit claim. So it was industry language and

thankfully, the public didn't have to kind of deal with it.

But, yeah, it wasn't DWP specific. The NHS also kind of used that

term, but, yeah, I'd like to have seen them try to use different language

and phase it out and eventually get the form to be called something which

did make sense, but that wasn't really in my remit, that wasn't what I

was there to do and whether it could be done or

not, I don't know, because people kind

of get set in their ways of what they call things.

It's the whole change management side of it as well, isn't it?

And it's just sort of the awareness, because I can think of a number

of reasons why you would need to have that as clear, simple language.

There's many doctors out there that have their own potential cognitive needs, but

also, if it's a new doctor, the NHS is struggling to get staff.

So you've got someone in that's not worked within that, they don't know the

acronyms, they're going to think, well, what do I search for?

And if they won't know that acronym? But, yeah, I'm in full support

of the change of the name of that silly document.

And it's so important as well, it's just to think that it's for someone

that's terminally ill, it's crazy. And unfortunately, I mean, it's not really

something that I've spoken about too much, but my fiancée was diagnosed with leukaemia

in November last year and we've had to go through that whole rigmarole of

the insurance documents, but also working through the NHS, who have been fantastic,

by the way. So I just want to put that

out there as well, that we've been really fortunate with our journey through

dealing with that, but being someone in that position, you don't want to hear

about things behind the scenes that may impact you financially, physically impacts

on treatment and stuff. So it just shows you just how

important it's not just the audio and visual side of accessibility, there's

things such as that headers, names of documents and the storage.

But, yeah, I digress, but thank you for trying your best to get it

changed. But then sorry to go back onto

the Impostor syndrome side of that and circle it back round.

It's really interesting that you say that, because obviously, if you've only got

guidelines to refer back to and there's no sort of set standard like, this

is exactly the reason I'm trying to make this change is X.

You can't argue with that, but you can argue with guidelines because they

just think it's an opinion.

Yeah, I think with that's always been a frustration, I think with things like

accessibility audits and whatnot.

There's this sort of idea that you can check something and it's

a binary answer, like you can look at it and go, yep, that meets

the criteria. That doesn't.

But a lot of it's human readable things, it's like, do your links make

sense? Do your headings make sense?

The things that are binary, you can definitely look at some of those things.

Like, is your HTML semantic? Are you using a header level

two when you should be using a header level three, or something like

that? But for a lot of the human.

Readable stuff, it does become a grey

area and two people can audit the same website and decide one can pass

it, one can fail. It just depending on what their context

is of the service. So I think the fact that they

are guidelines, like, I'm not even sure.

If W3C who wrote WCAG

ever intended it to be written into legislation, which I think does sometimes

complicate things.

But I think, yeah, it's definitely

better to have it in there.

I'd rather people pushed back and had a valid reason for pushing back than

to just accept everything. I think that's a really good example

of accessibility maturity. I think that was one of the

ways that I was trying to measure some of the stuff.

So we had some objectives and some key results, and one of the things

that I was looking for was constructive sort of pushback.

A lot of the time, if I said something failed in audit, everyone

just went, okay, tell me how to fix it.

But if somebody's saying, actually, we don't think that it is a failure,

and here's the reasons why, that shows a level of progression where they now

start to understand. They're now starting to look at the

guidelines themselves, and they're starting to assess their service against

the guidelines. And they've come to a different conclusion

than me because they've perhaps got more context.

So it's not always a bad thing, I think, when people push back.

But I think in the early days, if somebody pushed back and said, we

don't think it's a fail imposter syndrome.

Or whatnot, I'd just like panic.

Yeah, but it's an interesting so last week, actually, I was speaking to Kevin

White of the W3C. So we're going to be going PCR

Digital are going to be attending Accessibility

Scotland, which is another thing that he curates.

And well, we're going to be sponsoring it as well, which is another great

thing to announce on the podcast! but he was actually saying, it's really

interesting mentioning W3C anyway, because obviously he's had a hand in

developing and continuously developing those guidelines because I don't think

there's ever going to be a full stop.

Like, the web is always changing digital, the types of platforms that we use.

But he said the fundamentals of a lot of what he's done as a

consultant is actually re-teaching people how to use Word, which is like

the headings like you were just mentioning.

And it's amazing how, as a recruiter, I'm looking for people with all of

these different skills, knowledge of the WCAG guidelines of different Section 508

or all the other sort of regulations globally, as well as HTML coding

experience. Design experience.

User centred or human centred design. But actually it's the ability to put

yourself in other people's shoes and see things through.

Or have that empathy, I think, as well.

So there's always going to be those blurred lines, but I'm rambling, so..

But I guess, as I've mentioned, being a recruiter, and I think I probably

actually approached you initially to work with you when you're at the DWP,

or possibly to poach you for a different role...

But something I'd really be interested to understand from your perspective, because

obviously you were hiring people to join your team, like you said.

Has there been like a key skill or something that you would look for

within someone's profile through the sort of interview process, when you're getting

to know candidates a bit better? I'd love to know if there's a

hidden gem. Is there one thing that you're like

yep, that identifies a great candidate?

No pressure. Haha

It's a really good question. I think,

the hesitancy comes from the

fact that when you were saying that...

My brain went "resilience" and before, I

guess that's not something that I've personally looked for in a candidate, but

it's something that I hear a lot. They want a resilient person.

I'm not going to use that as my answer.

I don't want to say that that's something we should be looking for.

I mean, right now, you do need to be super resilient to work in

accessibility. Like, I was resilient for a while

and then I just got crushed by the machine, so to speak, and I

guess I hate that we have to be resilient.

Why do we live in a world where that's celebrated?

Your resistance to being crushed day in, day out isn't something that organisations

should be looking for in a candidate.

We should be looking for how we

change the world around us so that people don't need to be resilient in

order to do a good job.

So that was the word that came

to mind, but I don't want to use that as my answer.

I think I just kind of sidetracked and went on a bit of a

rant there. I think, in all honesty, like passion and

enthusiasm is probably the thing that I think makes a great candidate, especially

in accessibility, because so few people are enthusiastic about it at all.

Accessibility is often just kind of seen as a technical requirement or a checkbox

exercise, it's like a skill to acquire, like HTML or CSS or whatever.

But when you find somebody who really cares about accessibility and what it

represents and the people that are behind it, then I think that's something you

need to grab a hold of. Because a lot of people can learn

the technical skills, but not everybody can learn how to believe in a

cause with every fibre of their being, so to speak.

And I think that's what's going to change the culture of an organisation or

society as a whole. It's not being able to recite

WCAG 2.1 word for word. It's having that passion and that

enthusiasm to keep going at something which is really difficult, but is

fundamentally important for a lot of people.

Yeah, that's really encouraging to hear you say that, because the work that

I do, speaking to so many people that have potentially had experience

within accessibility, in a role that actually utilises those skills and that

knowledge and that passion, or those that haven't had the opportunity yet but

potentially can recite WCAG 2.1 because they're that passionate, they've gone.

Oh, I want to know it word for word.

But it's reassuring that I speak to so many people, more so now,

like this year onwards, that have got a genuine passion, but they're just

looking for a ways in. And I love to see that counterbalance,

because it's usually been, we don't know anyone with these skills or this

experience because they haven't had the opportunity elsewhere, because it isn't

funded within an organisation. The company isn't spending the money on

Accessibility because they see it as, "oh, it's just a nice to have", but

now I'm starting to see an uptick in the people that are interested have

gone out of their way. They're spending their own personal time

on learning a bit more about accessibility.

I think it's that empathy and that mindset as well, isn't it?

I think you need to sort of actually care, I was about to swear, but you

need to just care about it and think about other people, rather than, oh,

I can develop a platform, I'm going to develop it, so it works for

me. But you're just discounting so many

people. So, yeah, that's great, I'll keep doing

what I'm doing, keep looking for people with passion and keep the conversation

flowing. Haha! But, yeah, so it is such a

large topic and I mentioned earlier, it's not just the sort of audio and

visual side of things and like, can you read this on a web page

or can you enlarge this text? There's so many different areas to cover

and consider. So, like the compliance, awareness,

raising awareness. So, like something like this podcast or

the learning and development, putting in eLearning within your company

implementation, development, design, it's just never ending.

So the question there is one. I promise! Do you feel that working in the

accessibility space feels you've got that pressure to wear you're like the YMCA video

you've got to wear so many different hats and different costumes.

So complex and dedicated accessibility teams within companies

just aren't commonplace in the UK market. There is just like it's you.

You've got to wear so many different hats and cover all areas.

Yeah, I didn't know where you were going with that question for a second.

I was like, am I a cowboy?

I think, in short, yes. I think what I have observed

is that accessibility is normally just it's another

hat that somebody else wears a lot of the time.

It's a secondary scale attached to other role.

So you might be a Front End Developer, you might be a QA tester,

and you might know a bit about accessibility.

So you end up putting accessibility hat on in your team and sort of

trying to make sure that you do all of this stuff.

But it's always a secondary hat. The one that you wear most of

the time is your day job. Developer hat or QA hat or

whatever it might be, and then you kind of have to pick the accessibility

stuff up as well, because there's so few roles that are accessibility specific.

But I think when it comes to

Accessibility specific roles as well, like Accessibility as a specialism is still an

emerging, An emerging practise.

People don't realise how hard it is and they don't know what they need

in their organisation. They don't know what accessibility asset

specialism looks like in their organisation, because it might be

different in different organisations. There's just kind of this

blanket approach of, we need somebody for accessibility.

They look at everything that entails and they get sign off to hire one

person. So they put all of that stuff

in the job role. And then even as an accessibility

specialist, you're not specialising in one area, you're specialising in

accessibility, which is as broad as any other sort of discipline out there.

So I guess not all accessibility specialists are the same.

Some are super technical on the web side of things.

Some, as you mentioned earlier, spend more time fixing documents and PowerPoint

presentations and those sorts of things. Completely different skill sets.

Some accessibility specialists will tell you how high a grab rail needs

to be, or how steep the ramp in your building is allowed to legally

be to be compliant. They might not do anything with web

accessibility, but again, they're still an accessibility specialist.

It's just in a different area of the industry, so they're kind of expecting

one person to do all of this stuff.

You're expected to know. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Aure, WCAG 2.1

legislation. The Equality Act.

Public Sector Body Accessibility Regulations.

Then you might need to know European legislation, like a EN 301 549, which is

hilariously inaccessibly named, by the way, or you mentioned earlier, Section

508, like US regulations. You don't even work in the US,

but you might have to know the legislation for.

That, because that can just go in the job role as well.

Screen readers, voice controllers, screen magnifiers, some I've seen where you've

got to know how to use Braille readers, you've got to know how to

perform audits for the web, perform audits for mobile, which again, is completely

different. Manage stakeholders, manage up, manage

down, train new starters, write documentation, do procurement, do

strategy, do recruitment, and yeah, the list goes on.

And I guess the other thing that's

super frustrating about this is they'll put all that stuff in the job

advert and then they expect someone to do it for the salary

that's only half that of a front end developer.

There's very little value placed on accessibility specialists.

Most of the roles that we see go out are that of what is

normally a junior developer. So you've got an accessibility specialist

who has to check front end developer code and tell them why it's broken

and tell them how to fix it, and the developers getting paid twice the

salary. It's just crazy.

There's a lot of organisations that just don't seem to see the value in

what people do, and they ask for the world and give very little in

return. And I think that needs to change.

But yeah, I think to circle back.

To the question, I think sorry again for going off on a bit of

a rant, but I think, at least for a while, anyone who works in

accessibility, or in a role that's closely attached to accessibility will be wearing

multiple hats until accessibility matures as a practise.

Absolutely. I think you're bang on and I

mean, I was on some hiring, it's a huge tech giant that I work

for, can't say the name for legal reasons, it's within our contracts, and I

help them to hire mobile accessibility specialists.

And at times throughout the interview or the pre-screening, when I'm talking to

candidates about the role, there are times where people will say, why would I

do this as passionate as I am about accessibility?

Why would I drop my daily rate or my salary by that much when

it, on paper, looks like a Glorified QA role?

When I'm used to being hands on with coding?

24/7. And if I'm not, then I'll lose

those skills, because and I've spent ten years gaining those skills.

So it's it's a constant battle. But I think, like you say, I

don't think we can put a blanket title on things like that.

I think that's where I struggle when I've got job specs for every single

different type of company that might be hiring accessibility people, it has to be

accessibility / the role. And it's annoying that it is that,

but I think it's better to do that so that you've got things, people

that are covering in those specialist areas rather than just there's this one

blanket person. Yeah, I guess in a head off

kind of role, maybe you can say you've got the oversight because you've

dipped your toe in all of those, but you're more the overseer rather than

everything's going to get pushed to you.

Yeah, for sure. I think, in time, and this is

based on nothing but a hunch in kind of my own experience, so I

might be completely wrong, but I think in time accessibility specialist, although

it's an emergent practise, I think it'll probably diverge.

I think it'll split like, we used to have webmasters, and then that split

into various roles, and even we had UX designers and now we have interaction,

service, content, we've got all these different types of things.

I imagine at some point, accessibility, I'd

like to see it get to the point where accessibility you could

specialise in different things. You could be a document accessibility

specialist, you could be a web accessibility specialist, you could be

somebody that is a policy accessibility specialist.

I think it's it isn't it isn't a role in itself.

I think it is sorry, it is a role in itself, but I think

it's not a blanket specialism in itself.

I think there's various other elements to

it and you can't specialise in them all because there's just too much.

It's like trying to be an entire digital team on your own just isn't

really feasible.

I was going to liken it to saying that you're a developer and then

you actually mostly use sort of JavaScript or JavaScript frameworks and people are

saying, oh, here's a net job, go and do that.

Well, actually, the syntax is completely different, but actually you get polyglot

developers, so that's not even a fair comparison.

It's actually, like you say, a whole digital team in one person.

I mean, if you're compensated for the price of a full digital, maybe you.

Give it a go. Exactly.

I think if you specialise in if you're doing the job of three or

four people, why aren't you getting paid to do it?

I suppose?

Yeah, no, exactly. But I guess that's also where my

job comes in as a recruiter, because I'll get the spec, I'll understand it

from the hiring manager, I'll make sure I know exactly what area of accessibility

this person might need to be focusing on.

It's hard because, like you say, usually we've got the budget for one person but

"I want them to do everything" i try and make it very clear

that that's just not going to happen. You're going to get people that are

more leaning towards one sort of area of the space, and then it's my

job to pick out, oh, they work mostly in PDF accessibility rather than

web. So it's hard because I've been told

I'm the only person in the UK market focusing on accessibility

recruitment. Maybe that's a silly thing for me

to do, but I'm hoping to make a change there as well.

Can you put the salaries on the job roles?

That really bugs me when you view a job role and then it doesn't

tell you the salary just as competitive. Is that a thing?

Am I allowed to ask you that?

Absolutely, yeah. We get requests from certain clients to

say we don't want to put because internally it may be seen, you know,

internally, we know that our other developers know they use PCR digital to

hire, and if I'm not mentioning who the client is, they can probably work

it out by the layout of the job spec or what they're describing

they need. And that's usually to protect and make

sure there's not like a precedent set or people are aware of other people's

salaries when they join that team. So that's the only sort of viable

reason I've sort of potentially agreed in the past to not put a salary

on. If it's a contract role, the daily

rate or a range of daily rates is always there, depending on the

seniority. But, yeah, I'm completely with you.

I think it makes the job more accessible because then you're just like,

Well, I wouldn't apply if I knew it was 20 grand less than I'm

used to earning.

Well, I think with accessibility as well, because the job role is so bloated,

you're like, this must be like 150 grand a year for what they're asking

here, and then you're like, well, should I apply?

And then it turns out it's £32k. So you wouldn't have been applying in

the first place with yourself.

Exactly, yeah, no, completely fair to ask. And I'll make sure that that's what

I do in moving forward. So if there's any future clients that

are listening to this, then we're going to have to put the

the salaries on the job specs, if you're working with us.

There you go, commitment! So, in that sort of realm of

things, how has your experience been in job hunting and the sort of interview

process? Was there anything in particular that you

think might help make that process, the interview process, more accessible for

those that may have additional needs or any form of sort of disability or

anything?

Yeah, that's a good question.

Again. Difficult, I think.

I think for me personally, I guess for transparency, I mean, I talk about.

This regular anyway, so it's not probably.

That big of a secret, but I guess for transparency, like, I'm

diagnosed with ADHD and there's also a really good chance that I'm autistic.

I'm not kind of pursuing a diagnosis for autism, but it's pretty evident that

I have a lot of the traits.

So I find interviews a bit of a nightmare on many levels.

I think a lot of the interviews that I've done in the past few.

Years have been in government and there's.

A very rigid process. There's a very almost a gamification to

the way that it's done.

Like, there's a set, a certain set of behaviours, and the behaviours are all

documented in a book somewhere and there's a certain set of skills and you're

kind of told what behaviours you're going to be mapped against and then you

can try and figure out how to shoehorn all of your examples to fit

the behaviours. And the whole thing is a little

bit strange, but I guess in more

recent interviews, obviously, I've only been in this role for six months,

so I was kind of doing some interviews at the back end of last

year and I do get really anxious around the uncertainty, I think.

I think that's the biggest thing for me.

I'm fine with bad news, I'm fine with good news.

The uncertainty is what kind of kills me.

And I think recruitment processes are super opaque.

Like job adverts are huge, they're difficult to process.

The recruiter always wants to have a chat, but doesn't necessarily set an

agenda or tell you what to expect from that chat.

Not saying you do that by any way, I'm not bashing recruiters, but

there's a lot of, oh, you just want to have a chat and I'm

like, yeah, what about, like the job? But what are you going to ask

me? So that is, I guess, a bit

nerve wracking and sometimes now there's like three or four interviews and you

have interviews with different people at different stages.

You might have an interview with a recruiter.

Then I was going for design roles. So you'd have an interview with a

designer or two and then you'd have an interview with somebody else.

And I guess it's not always clear

what the differences are either

so I assume when I'm talking to

the designer, I'm going to be talking about design work, I'm going to be

asked about things that I do as a designer work, sort of way I

work and that sort of thing. But what about the other three interviews?

If I've got to have an interview with somebody from HR or whatever, what

are they going to ask me? What do I need prepare for that?

It's not always clear. So I mentioned Nikki Berry before, when

me and Nikki did some recruitment at the back end of 2022.

We were doing some recruitment for two accessibility specialists.

And one of the things which we worked really hard to remove was some

of that uncertainty. So one of the things which worked

really well was sending the questions out ahead of time.

Because it's civil service, we were met with quite a bit of resistance.

People didn't want me to send the questions, they were the exact questions

we were going to be. It wasn't like, oh, you'll be asked

about these things, it was like, we will ask you verbatim these questions.

And people in the department seemed convinced that if people had the

questions, they'd somehow cheat the interview, like they'd somehow fabricate

entire examples to meet them sort of questions, which in reality wasn't true,

but we ended up doing it in the end.

But there was a bit of a compromise where they said, okay, well you

can send them out ahead of time

but they have to be time boxed.

So we ended up sending them out an hour before.

So every candidate one hour, they were told ahead of time that's when they'd

received the questions, so they knew to look in their inbox an hour before

the interview. And we dispatched them questions 1 hour

before, which gave them time, I guess

just to read over the questions and know what to expect.

But it wasn't so much time that

they could overthink it and prepare really scripted answers

and we did find that people were much more relaxed.

There was a noticeable change in the first half of an interview.

Normally the first half is quite difficult

and then people settle into it and they get better

towards the end of the interview. We found that people were much more

relaxed coming in. They gave a better account of themselves

off the bat just because they knew what we were going to ask, there

was no surprises. And I think they had time to

kind of work out which examples they were going to use for each question.

And it just became a much more rather than putting them on the spot

and getting them to pull examples off the top of their head, it was

just that everything flowed a bit easier and they were more relaxed and they

gave better answers and it worked a lot better for us.

So I think another thing sorry, I'll

wrap this up in a second, but I think something else has just came

to my mind, which is one of the things I don't think that people

take into account all of the time is when you're hiring accessibility

specialists, often the people that apply for them roles are people that rely

on things being accessible. Like in a world where accessibility

maturity is low, the experts that are out there are often the people who

had to learn it out of necessity rather than because it's a career that's

going to be fruitful, so to speak. So when you are doing interviews and

you get people applying for roles, a lot of the people who apply actually

rely on that accessible, they rely on things being accessible.

So making the interview process as inclusive

as possible and making as many adjustments that you can to accommodate those people

in their role is in the best interest of everyone.

If you've got a rigid interview process, people like me, I guess, who have

ADHD or autism or whatever might not give a good account of themselves because

of that uncertainty and you're going to end up in a situation where you're

just hiring people who again, don't necessarily rely on accessibility to do

those accessibility roles. And that lack of diversity means that

you're probably not going to get to the right outcome.

So I think making everything as inclusive as possible means you are more likely.

To get people you're more likely to.

Get the people into those roles who

you want. Definitely, and have that experience as well.

Like you said, I think including people with lived experience within the

accessibility process is a necessity. And then I've had people that have

come to me, hiring managers that have said, oh, we might have a need

for some UX researchers with lived experience.

Can you do that rather than find us the specialists?

And I'm like, but why aren't your specialists, why don't some of your

specialists or some of your team have that lived experience?

Because then it's ingrained in your processes.

But yeah, so just a bit of a I just want to make sure

that people are aware that I do make sure that if I can get

the interview questions, I send them out. I always ask for reasonable accommodations

before interviews are even scheduled. If anyone needs any sort of adjustments

made, then I'll make sure that's the case even when it comes to sort

of the podcast. So it's nice that I managed to

send you a few questions, outlined what we'd be talking about, and then you

come back with your answers. I hope it helps you.

But it also really helps me to sort of keep that going because this

is a new thing still for me, and it just helps me to keep

that conversation flowing. I know we had a chat for

over an hour, like last year, I think it was, but it might have

been the beginning of this year, losing track of time because I talk so

much! And it flows. So maybe I should just start calling

people and having a chat and recording.

Yeah, but set an agenda first! No, I think there was a point

there that you made, though, around lived experience.

And I think something else which is useful.

Maybe useful is the wrong word, but something else which is I guess,

interesting.

Is when you hire people with lived experience into those roles.

When you hire people as accessibility specialists.

Who have to live and breath it every day.

It also helps when you're trying to convince people that things need to be

accessible. So one of the things that I've

seen is Nikki, for example, who took over as head of accessibility [DWP].

Nikki is a wheelchair user, and when Niki sits opposite somebody and argues for

accessibility and they're saying they don't see the point in doing it,

they're arguing with somebody who it directly impacts.

And that becomes a much more difficult conversation to have than when you're sat

there with somebody like me, who doesn't necessarily look like I have any

impairments on the surface. People just go, oh, we don't have

any users like that, we don't see the point in this

and sometimes when Nikki sat opposite in the chair, it becomes a much more

difficult thing to wriggle out of. I hope Nikki doesn't mind me saying

that, but I have seen it firsthand, where people have sort of not especially

over MS Teams and things people don't always see the chair and

they're arguing, they don't see the point in it

and Nikki handles it very well, but

they're essentially saying, we don't care about fixing this for you, so to

speak.

Definitely, but even not necessarily to sort of just throw it in people's

faces. I know that's not the invention, but

it's also the awareness. They may not be aware and it

could just be blissful ignorance where they just think, oh no, surely not,

no one's going to be using this service.

But it's an instant bit of awareness that actually, no, not just your users,

but your employees need things to be accessible.

We hear that a lot. I mean, the amount of times I

heard all where we don't have any users with accessibility needs.

And it's this sort of self fulfilling

prophecy where people have products that aren't

accessible and then they hire people in to use them

and one of the specifications, I guess, is you've got to be able to

use a system, so if somebody uses a screen reader or voice control and

it doesn't work, then they can't be hired into that role because they can't

do it because the service isn't accessible.

And then you end up in this perpetual state of, oh, well, we don't

have any accessible any users that require accessibility and say, yeah, because you

can't hire them. You created an ableist environment where

these people physically can't come in and do the role, and then you're using

that to validate the fact that you don't need to do accessibility because you

don't have any users that have accessibility needs.

So there's this weird paradigm where people justify to themselves with this

circle of something other than a swear word that I can't think of...

Yes, I think we're following and I think it's an unfortunate thing to happen.

It's like a catch 22 though, isn't it's?

Just sort of, oh, no, we don't need that, but I need that.

Okay, well, can you come in and fix it?

But if I can't access it, then how can I actually even start to

think about how to begin? Yeah, man, we could talk for days.

I'm going to just skip forward to the sort of final thoughts, if that's

okay, Craig?

So I guess if you're happy to sort of take this time to just

share something of importance to you at the moment, either within sort of personal

life or accessibility. I mean, obviously theme of the podcast,

but feel free to share if you're putting together anything yourself.

Yeah, I think something that is of real importance to me at the moment

is I think trying to push for accessibility beyond compliance.

I think somehow compliance has become this end goal.

It's become this, people achieve compliance and pat themselves on the back and

say that they're awesome because everything's accessible, when actually

compliance is probably just the bare minimum.

That should be the first step to whatever it is that you're trying to

do. I've seen a lot of compliance sites

which just aren't usable. They're full of jargon and animations and

parallax effects and bad content and all sorts of things, but they pass an

audit because the audit is only looking for [WCAG] AA and a lot of these

things fit into the [WCAG] AAA criteria.

So I'm doing a lot of talks.

At the moment, but I say a lot of talks.

I've done like three, I think, but I'd like to do more, I guess

now that I'm not working 70 hours weeks, I'd like to do more talks

and things. But at the moment I've been doing

some talks on designing for Neurodiversity and I guess that's because people like

me get ignored when people just focus on compliance.

But I'm kind of hoping that it can change the way that

people think about it because accessibility wasn't thought of at all and

it's definitely getting better now. People know they need to be compliant,

but what I don't want is people just going, oh, we need to be

compliant, the end. So I think I want to get

people thinking, okay, well, once you're compliant, then what more can you do

to make sure it works for everybody? Rather than just saying we passed an

audit, we're great, let's sort of be done, I think.

W3C. It's worth probably mentioning that they

are planning to address they've noticed that WCAG 2.1, in the way that

it's currently being used, doesn't do.

A lot to cater for people with.

Cognitive issues or Neurodiversity and those sorts sorts of things.

They are looking to address that in.

WCAG 3.0, but that's probably like a decade away.

So in the short term it's like an interim measure.

They're working on this thing called CoGA, or the Cognitive Accessibility Guidelines,

which is like a set of eight design principles which help cover off

some of the stuff that is being missed by WCAG double A compliance.

So I'd like to get more people thinking about that.

I think if you go and look up the Cognitive Accessibility Guidelines,

read through those, they're just good design.

Like you'll read it and you'll go, yeah, that makes sense.

None of this is a surprise, but I think they're good to just remind

people of things so it's get it to be compliant.

Work with CoGA, I think it'll make.

Things a lot better for a lot of people rather than just pass it

and order it. I've been planning on writing a book,

so maybe now is the time and I'll just dump all of this stuff

into there.

Well, once I've done the transcript, I'll

send it to you and you might have half a book ready! With the

amount that we talk! Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

I just want to flip slightly back as well when you talk because obviously

you're talking about cognitive accessibility.

There are obviously different principles to making sure that you're accessible.

Not compliant, but accessible. And it's so easy to just sort

of think of the standard sort of impairments that people may have, the

audio, the visual. And when you've got people with lived

experience, I think just to sort of not protect, but see it from the

employer's point of view as well. If you get people with one form

of lived experience, so say someone that's blind, that is a web developer... There's

amazing web developers out there that either have visual impairments or are

registered blind. They've got the lived experience of

interacting with web content with THAT impairment, but they don't [may not] have the

cognitive side of things. So I kind of understand why you

might not it won't encompass everything. As much as you can get people

with some lived experience in certain areas, it won't cover all areas of

impairment as well. But, yeah, I would absolutely love to

see more on the cognitive side of things.

I think there is, like you say, there's more being done, I'm seeing more

and more stuff out there. Maybe it's you, maybe I just keep

seeing you post about it is always a good

thing, but cool. So, I mean, we've rambled on, it's

been amazing chat, but I think to save people getting bored of my voice,

not yours, because you've got an amazing accent.

Probably mine and my stupid accent, but no lovely accent.

Well, I mean, that's quite rude, isn't it?

I'm saying that you've got an accent, but maybe I've got an accent to

you. So I'd like to finish each episode

with a quote that sort of inspires listeners and just assure them that it's

not all doom and gloom. I know we've spoken about impostor

syndrome, about burnout, about wearing too many hats like the one you've got

on now. Have you got any quotes that you've

come across?

Yeah, I'm not sure that it will assure everybody that it's not all doom

and gloom, but one of my favourite quotes to inspire people over the years

has been I heard it from Molly Watt originally.

Molly was doing a talk at Camp Digital in Manchester several years ago,

and she used this quote, which was, one in five people in the UK

have a disability. It's the same number of people who

have brown eyes. Imagine saying, Sorry, you can't use our

product because your eyes are the wrong colour.

Because I think that's essentially what you're saying when you make things

inaccessible. The quote was originally about blue eyes

but since that talk, the UK's eye

demographic has changed weirdly. So brown eyes is now at 22%,

which is roughly one in five. So I've had to modify the original

quote. But it still works.

I think when you say it like that, nobody would turn around and say,

you're not using our service because your eyes are blue or brown or whatever,

but that's essentially what we're doing when.

We make things not accessible.

The be all, end all is; if you're not making your products accessible

to everyone or even attempting to do so, you're discriminating.

It is discrimination.

You need to make sure that you're developing and designing with everyone in

mind and not excluding people, even if they have brown eyes.

Yeah, there's no grey areas. You either discriminate or you don't.

You either

do the work you don't. Exactly, perfect.

Well, I look forward to, hopefully continuing the conversation, moving

forward, staying in touch with you. Thank you so much for spending this

last hour with me and chatting about accessibility and hopefully it's going to

raise some more awareness out there.

If you've got any links or anything

like that, if you've got any social media that you want to share, then

we can say it now, but I'll also add links and stuff.

Yeah, I'm just @Abbott567 on pretty much everything, but Twitter is

where I mainly talk about work. If you look up me on Instagram,

you'll just find a lot of wildlife photos because I like to go out

and take pictures of animals. So, yeah, if you look me up

on Instagram, there's going to be nothing about accessibility, but there will be a

bunch of pictures of animals, which are alt text up.

I was just about to ask. Make sure you've got that alt text.

There's always alt text on them.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Craig.

And, yeah, I look forward to staying in touch, moving forward.

No worries. Thanks for having me.

Cheers, dude.