Richard Morton, Head of Accessibility for Government, UK Central Digital and Data Office

Richard talks about his early work with usability testing that also exposed him to the opportunities working with accessibility. He describes the community and knowledge-sharing in the UK. Now he works for the UK Digital and Data Office where the team support accessibility in government organizations. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Info about Accessibility at Blink

(upbeat music)

- Hello.

This is Digital Accessibility,

the people behind the progress.

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

and as an accessibility professional myself,

I find it very interesting

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

So let's meet one of those people right now

and hear about their journey.

(upbeat music continuing)

Alright, well, welcome back to another episode,

where I get the opportunity

to speak with an accessibility practitioner.

And today I'm pleased to be speaking with Richard Morton.

Hi, Richard.

How are you today?

- Hi, Joe.

Yeah, thanks for inviting me.

I'm good, thanks.

Yeah.

- Well, I am, as mostly usual,

in my home office on Vashon Island,

which is near Blink's Seattle headquarters.

Where are you talking to me from?

- I'm talking to you from Birmingham, England, in the UK,

as I say, in the center of England.

Yeah.

It's nice and sunny here today as well.

- Alright.

Great.

Well, I've had the opportunity to visit there one time,

and enjoyed that,

and it's great to be able to have some perspectives from

the UK for this podcast.

I appreciate you getting involved.

You know, one of the best places to start would be

if you could just talk a little bit about

the things that you're involved with right now.

- Sure, yeah.

I mean, what I do is try

and build accessibility capability across

the UK government.

That's my role, if you like.

It's mostly cross-government,

so it's the different departments within central government,

the national government, if you like,

and it's helping to get teams to understand

what the needs for accessibility are,

raising awareness about that,

helping to understand the regulations,

you know, the laws that are in place,

and giving them tips and techniques

for how to make things accessible,

but also trying to, as I say,

build capability through things like training,

through things like accessibility empathy labs we run,

through things like clinics we run,

where people come to us with questions.

We do it through lots of different routes, I guess.

But UK government's split up into lots of departments

and smaller organizations,

and reaching those is quite a difficult task.

So one of the things we do

is we run a community of professionals across government,

digital professionals,

not necessarily accessibility specialists.

Well, I guess most of them aren't, actually,

because there's around 1600 people in that group,

and they share experiences, ideas, raise questions.

And the idea is that it makes it more efficient,

makes it a better process

for people getting to understand this stuff,

particularly because people come into government,

or come into the public sector

with not much knowledge about accessibility,

that's probably being polite,

very little knowledge in many cases,

because the private sector doesn't necessarily

do this terribly well.

There are good examples in larger organizations,

things like that,

but a lot of the small organizations

just don't know about this stuff,

and it's not really known in academic institutions either.

It's not taught in computer science degrees

or in design degrees, those sort of things.

So we're constantly having to train people

and raise awareness.

So that's the big thing,

is, as I say, building capability.

- Well, on your LinkedIn profile,

you have your current title

as Head of Accessibility for Government.

Is that the right way?

That sounds like a really, really broad,

far-reaching position.

- It kind of is.

It's more sort of,

it just means it's a cross government role.

It doesn't mean I head up a massive team across government,

or anything like that.

It's an informal title, if you like, across government.

So it's a sort of,

we're a center of expertise for accessibility,

but we're supported by

a lot of other professionals across

their own group of, I dunno,

50 or 60 accessibility professionals across government.

And there are leaders in other departments,

some of the bigger departments.

So we all work together.

So it's more about coordinating,

running the communities,

building things through blogs,

that sort of thing.

And through the communities, we also have meetups.

We have talks where we get people to talk about

their projects they've been working on,

but also get external speakers in as well,

and that helps give a different perspective on things.

- Right.

Great.

Well, one of the things I like to do with this podcast

is to find out how people ended up where they are today.

So maybe you could go back in time

and pick out maybe the first milestone

where you became aware of accessibility as a profession.

What would be a good place to start?

- Sure.

I mean, I've been in IT for a long time now,

going on for 40 years,

but probably about the last 16 years of that

have been as an accessibility specialist.

And that started when I was working on testing

for other companies for websites.

So compatibility testing, if you like,

making sure that websites worked,

making sure they worked across different browsers,

making sure they did what functional specifications said,

things like that.

And it was just general testing to start with,

general functional testing,

general usability testing,

and it developed into accessibility testing

because the demand was there from certain clients.

So I pretty much became self-taught

in how to do that about 16 years ago.

And I ran my own business for a long time doing that

for various agencies,

design agencies, but testing agencies in particular.

And they had clients in mostly the commercial sector,

actually, not so much in public sector and government.

Then six years--

- Well, so it sounds like you were able

to find your own path with that.

Was there something about the accessibility part

of the testing that particularly intrigued you,

where you began to do more and more of that type of work?

- To a degree, yes, but I think, to be honest,

it was largely market driven, if you like.

That was where the work was.

You know, there was limited amount of ordinary testing,

or general testing,

so I went where the market took me, and that's...

But my interests developed over time.

And this was, you know,

originally, with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines,

version one when I started,

and that changed, obviously, back in 2008,

I think it was, version two.

So there was a whole learning curve,

and how to learn about assistive technologies,

how to learn about why we do this stuff.

Maybe did it in a slightly backwards way, if you like,

but that's often what happens with these things,

in that you fall into these things by accident.

You can do, yeah.

- And so then,

as you pursued that accessibility testing area,

essentially, what was going on at that time?

Were you being engaged

to review certain digital products and services

and identify whether things were in compliance,

or were you also getting involved

in the design of those systems?

- It wasn't so much the design.

I mean, I did some design on my own for small clients.

I did develop and design some websites,

and tried to make sure those were accessible,

but this was mostly

what you call web accessibility auditing.

So it was particularly using

the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines,

using also things like Section 508, the US standards,

and auditing sites, organizations,

who were going through a build process, if you like.

And it was often, as is the case with these things,

it was towards the end of the project where they decided

they needed to do accessibility testing.

So it was usually the case

that there were a lot of issues to be found,

and I would do the tests, write reports,

and then often present it to the developers and designers,

and go through things with them.

And that tended to be a sort of educational thing for them,

because they often just didn't know this stuff.

So it wasn't a case of,

"Oh, yeah, thanks for pointing that out."

They needed to get to grips with why is this important,

or what is this about.

You know, why does it matter whether something only works

with a keyboard, for example,

that sort of thing.

It was that basic in a lot of cases,

so I had to obviously refine how I did that.

- Well, you mentioned Section 508,

which is related specifically to United States legislation.

That was something that I've always been interested in,

is, you know, I guess,

how important the Section 508 was

in terms of things that happened in the UK versus

what came out of the W3C,

which is a little bit more broadly international.

And then I know you have your own own national standards

for that as well.

So maybe you could talk a little bit about

what actually you had to audit against.

- Yeah, in terms of Section 508,

it was specifically for US clients,

or global clients based in the US, if you like.

So that was why that happened.

For the UK, it was mostly

the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

that we audited against.

Also, in some cases, specific internal company guidelines,

or organizational guidelines.

And, yeah, so we worked with whatever guidelines we had.

They're quite similar in many ways.

WCAG 1 was quite similar to Section 508,

and WCAG 2 is now similar to the current Section 508,

so there's a lot of overlap between that,

but always with the emphasis

of going beyond specific compliance and into best practice

and things like that.

So not just pointing out something

that had to meet a particular requirement,

what's the best practice in that area,

what's the best way of doing it.

So it would be about not just pointing out

what the issue was,

but pointing out what the potential solution was.

Obviously, not saying you have to do it this way.

There's usually multiple ways to do something.

But for example, giving examples of colors that would work,

in terms of color contrast, that sort of thing.

- And was there a community of accessibility colleagues

that you worked with to learn about and get ideas from?

Has accessibility grown up within the UK

as a place where people look at it

as an active place to be involved as a professional?

- Yeah.

I guess it was quite a small group back in,

whatever year it was 16 years ago,

but it's grown since then.

It's still a small profession, if you like.

It's not a massive profession.

It's a small profession.

But there's a whole community out there,

and I'm in touch with most of them

through things like Twitter,

but the other connections as well.

And it's a very collaborative community.

People are very willing to share ideas and experiences,

and how they do stuff.

And, you know, things around new guidelines coming out,

for example, or new legislation,

there's a lot of sharing going on.

And I think people are in it more for the greater good

than just individual self-interest, if you like.

I mean, obviously, people have to work to make money,

but they're usually very willing to share.

And as a result of that,

there's a lot of conferences go on.

There's been some great ones recently,

like Axcon I went to, and I spoke at last year.

They've become sort of global.

Particularly with COVID,

it's made it easier to do these things online more,

rather than face to face,

so more people can get to them.

So there's been a sort of real growth,

particularly in the last couple of years,

that I've seen, that's been fantastic.

There's a season of things coming up over

the next couple of months.

We have Global Accessibility Awareness Day coming up

in mid-May,

which leads to a a raft of events going on that week,

so that's really good.

So, as I say, there's great collaboration going on, yeah.

- And so then what followed on from the consulting?

Is that where you moved into work with the government?

- Yeah.

I got invited to come in to GDS,

to see if I would be able to help them with accessibility.

The head of accessibility then asked me to come in,

and yeah, I joined about six years ago,

well, just over six years ago,

at the Government Digital Service.

Been working there ever since,

apart from the fact that we moved

to a different organization last year,

called the Central Digital and Data Office.

But we're all part of the UK Cabinet Office,

which is part of this central government.

Yeah, and they asked me to come in

to help make sure that things like gov.uk was accessible,

Gov.uk is kind of a shining example of accessibility.

It was built with accessibility in mind.

But obviously, over a few years,

it's changed and developed,

and lots of new things, lots of new features,

lots of new products as well, had come in.

And so it was the case that it needed,

not quite a reboot,

but it needed looking at in more detail again.

So I came in to help with that.

There were initially just the two of us,

and then we built a team,

and we started to do more and more things around

the internal stuff, gov.uk,

and the pay service, and things like that.

But then we did an investigation,

or research, if you like,

into what were the needs

of the rest of government teams across government.

And we knew what the answer was,

but the research proved that they needed a lot of help

in building capability.

They were all,

you know, they all had good intentions.

They wanted to make things accessible,

but they just didn't have the knowledge of how to do this.

They didn't know when to do it,

they didn't know what the techniques were,

they didn't know who needed to do what at what stage,

all those sort of things.

So that's where we went next, if you like,

to build capability through things like training.

- And in the UK, is there a legislative directive

about government organizations being accessible?

'Cause that's really what the Section 508

and other parts of the legislation are for,

for the federal government in the United States.

So, you know, that's similar,

where those organizations you're talking about really

do need to be in compliance with that?

- Yeah, sure.

I mean, for a long time now there's been a thing called

The Disability Discrimination Act,

which says you can't discriminate against people

with disabilities, in terms of services.

And that's not just in the public sector,

that's across the private sector.

That developed and became the Equality Act,

which protected against nine different characteristics,

including disability.

But then more recently there's been what's called

The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations,

which came out in 2018.

And those are what you were just hinting at,

which say the public sector has to make things accessible

for a particular standard,

which effectively is

the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1,

(indistinct speech)

And this came out of the European Union.

It was a directive from the European Union

for all the EU member states,

and, obviously, the United Kingdom was a Member State

at the time.

This was before Brexit, before we left the EU.

So we created this legislation in our own laws,

and that is now in place.

And all public sector bodies,

with the exception of one or two smaller ones,

or certain types, broadcasters, public broadcasters,

most of them have to follow this legislation.

And it's about making these websites and documents

and internal services accessible for everyone,

according to the sort of principles of accessibility,

but following a particular standard.

There is a monitoring body for this,

which sits within our organization at the moment,

and that goes around and checks public sector websites.

It does it on a sampling basis rather than,

you know, it isn't possible

to check all of the public sector.

There's tens, probably hundreds of thousands,

of websites across the public sector,

which is changing every day.

So they do it on a sampling basis.

They deal with complaints from members of the public,

or members of internal staff.

And they can check.

You know, they can audit websites.

They also audit mobile applications,

so native applications,

and they can audit things like documents as well, yeah.

- And is it then that the lead officers

of the different government offices know

that they have that responsibility,

and that then they identify their own ways

to be able to support accessibility?

I guess that might include checking in

with your office for guidance.

- Yeah.

We can provide them with support in a sort of informal way,

but it is ultimately

up to each individual public sector organization

to make sure they're meeting the regulations,

however they wanna do that.

They basically have to meet the standards.

We provide guidance in how they can do that,

and we help them wherever we can.

There's a limit to what we can do, obviously.

But we ran a campaign for the last two years,

ending last autumn,

to try and raise awareness across the public sector.

And it was quite a lot of work we put in to do that,

because the public sector just wasn't aware of this stuff.

And it was a big thing to,

a big change, if you like.

Yeah.

So it's certainly worked,

in the sense that we've seen improvements in accessibility.

There's probably a lot of work still to go.

You know, it's not the be all and end all.

And, of course, it's about compliance.

And compliance isn't everything.

Compliance is only the bare minimum

of what needs to be done to make something accessible.

That's something I constantly tell people,

you know, "This is just the bare minimum.

Don't focus on this and think this is all we've gotta do."

- I know in the United States we have,

well, we have our equivalent digital service

that is responsible for similar things

in the United States government.

And I know they put out specific guidance,

or maybe recommendations, on best practices.

And I was wondering,

does your office do things with trying to get other agencies

to use certain templates or certain best practices?

I imagine it's extremely difficult to have any type

of standardization across, as you mentioned,

potentially hundreds of thousands of sites.

- Yeah, absolutely.

We've tried to create resources that help,

so guidance around the regulations,

what people need to do specifically,

because of the regulations just written

in legal form, and that.

So we've provided guidance for that.

We've provided a campaign of raising awareness,

and training that talks about it,

and what people's responsibilities are.

And we're constantly trying

to raise awareness amongst individual digital professionals

about their need to take on their own part

of this responsibility.

So a developer has a certain responsibility,

a designer has a certain responsibility.

We actually work with the US AT&F organization,

to help create some of the best practice guidance.

We work with them on theirs,

and we use that as a sort of backbone

for some of our stuff as well.

And so, as I say, there's collaboration globally

on some of these things as well.

And we created a guide

to the web content accessibility guidelines,

to make it what we called a work-egg primer,

which was to make it simpler for teams

to understand their responsibilities and what to do,

because the work-egg guidelines can be

a bit dense and difficult to understand.

And we are doing more work on that now, actually,

to try and work out how we interpret those guidelines,

in terms of regulations monitoring,

so that we can be consistent about it,

but also, that can lead to, hopefully,

a better understanding of what works and what doesn't work.

So yeah, we've done quite a lot of work, I think,

on trying to build up resources that people can use,

and encouraging them to do that.

And as I say, things like,

just a simple thing we run

is, as I say, a clinic, which we do every week,

which is open to anyone across the public sector.

We do it by appointment, and it's just an hour,

but it gives people an opportunity

to talk about the issues they might be facing,

or the plans they've got,

or just ask us about the regulations.

And it's surprising how much you can get done in an hour,

how much you can learn in an hour,

about a project and stuff.

And we've done other things,

like create what we call accessible personas,

to try and simulate some of the barriers

that people might face.

And that's helped teams with testing, for example,

so that they can test against a screen reader,

or something like that.

We always point out that this isn't a real life experience,

but it helps people get an idea

of some of the barriers people face,

and it can eliminate some of the basic errors,

things like that.

So, yeah, we're constantly trying to do that.

- Well, you've been involved in this for quite a while now.

Looking toward the future,

are there any certain initiatives

that are happening in the government,

or things that your own organization is looking forward to,

moving into the future?

Or another aspect to that

is how much have you seen things change?

Are there certain areas

that you think still deserve more funding or resources

than have currently been applied to it?

- I think that, to honest,

there's been a big focus, as I say,

on the regulations and how that affects organizations,

and that focus has been largely

on the public-facing side of things,

so people's websites,

people's information that faces the public,

or goes out to the public.

There hasn't been so much of a focus on internal systems,

and I think that's one area that needs a lot of work,

is how accessible are your internal systems?

They often rely on products

that are procured from the private sector,

so we are relying on those being accessible ,

and not needing too much customization or changes.

And that's difficult.

That is challenging.

As I say, there are providers who are providing products

that are good,

but there are plenty of smaller products

that need a lot of work.

And it's partly around raising awareness

in the private sector as well,

which we've been doing some work on

to try and raise awareness of,

not their legal obligations,

but the fact that their market is impacted by the fact

that the public sector needs to make sure

the products they buy are accessible

and meet the needs of their internal staff,

public servants, civil servants.

And I think that's gonna be a big challenge,

to continue to do that.

It's something we've been doing work on,

but there's a long way to go.

I think, related to that, one of my bug bears, if you like,

is the number of documents that are out there

that aren't accessible.

You know, mostly PDFs,

not just PDFs,

but mostly portable document format, PDFs,

that may not need to be PDFs, for a start.

We discourage the use of them wherever possible,

but where they are used,

we wanna make sure that they've been treated

as being made accessible from the start, if possible.

But there are literally thousands of them being produced,

probably every month, so it's a big task.

So there's a lot of work still to do on that, yeah.

- Well, Richard, I wanna thank you for taking the time

to chat with me about the things going on

in your organization in the UK.

And hopefully we can meet in person at some point,

maybe if I'm in the UK, or you're in the United States.

- Yeah, great.

That'd be cool.

- Alright, thanks a lot.