Video Interview Series #8: Start with everyone. With Gareth Ford-WIlliams

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Introduction

For the 8th interview in our ‘Skip to Content’ interview series, Dom speaks to Ab11y’s Gareth Ford-Williams.

Gareth was founder of the digital accessibility team in BBC New Media, heavily involved in developing iPlayer and determining BBC accessibility standards for an organisation who’s assets were accessed by a billion people per week in 44 languages!

Gareth spoke to Dom about real-life digital inclusion, how important it is to find your people and create a culture of accessibility and how a lot of his digital accessibility principles principles were born out of the petri-dish’ his team created with the BBC iPlayer

Who are you and what do you care about?

I’ve done accessibility at the BBC for nearly 17 years. And, that came from what I care about, because I started in marketing before that and, at the end of the day, this is just about audiences, it’s about people.

For me, it was never a compliance issue. I never came from that background. The BBC is an organization. It’s supposed to inform, educate, and entertain everyone in the UK. And there’s nothing in there that caveats its audience, it doesn’t say “except them” in anything that it does. And I kind of bought into that.

It’s just just one of those things, we’re just talking about people wanting to access things the same as everyone else.

And that’s what I care about. If you’re going to deal with inclusion and equality and the morality of what it is that you do, you have to start with everyone.

I find the word accessibility quite loaded, and problematic because of that, because we have a preconceived idea about what we want, and it sounds very worthy.

Whereas ‘everyone’ is an incredibly worthwhile thing, because it talks about the greatest reach that you can have and the most engagement opportunity you can have. And these are all marketing things. And so why wouldn’t you?

So I care about that in the fact that it works both for organizations and for people, and connecting the two things up.

When I looked at this, again, coming from an outsider’s perspective, back in 2005, slowly getting this picture in my head that actually, everything starts out completely accessible, and everyone can access it before we actually design and build it.

So when we just have an idea, like “Let’s make a video streaming service” – Yeah, yeah, great, anyone can access that because it’s not been built yet. It’s just a concept. It’s an abstract idea. And that’s completely inclusive.

And then we slowly as designers, and as engineers, and as content producers, we slowly filter the people out through the decisions that we make. And we’re gonna do this way, and then we never look at, we never think about the impact of the decisions until it’s way too late.

How do we undo this? And this is why accessibility seems to be this thing that was shoved in. Why it’s shoved in is because it’s already been shoved out! Actively!

Well, I care about changing that perspective:

Don’t build things and try and make them accessible, try to build accessible things.

And sticking with a word ‘everyone’, it’s a word I really care about. And it’s something that I find massively interesting, and it’s a simple word, ‘everyone’.

I even at one point tried in very BBC fashion to try and get my job title change to the head of ‘everyone’. It wasn’t a joke. But I did actually send it to my my director at the time, who spent a whole two minutes thinking about it and sending me back a text saying nice try, but for me, the word sums up more about what we’re talking about.

How do you personally go about explaining the importance of online accessibility to someone who’s never even considered it?

I’ve kind of covered a little bit of that already. Because this ‘everyone’ bit – ‘Everyone’ can expand, because it could be everyone everywhere at any time.

And because you then start to understand that, you know, when we’re talking about everyone, we still have a very kind of medical view of everyone. In that way, we’re still thinking about age, and we’re thinking about gender, we could talk about the cultural side of stuff or language, we can think about challenges to do with conditions that we may have, or an impairment that we might have, that might change the way that we need the world to interface.

I mean, I’m dyslexic, I have ADHD. And I don’t see that as a brokenness. When it comes to language and information architecture, and animation, I have particular requirements around those things, and this kind of helped me understand what it is that I’m supposed to be doing, and how it is that I’m supposed to engage. And, you know, when when you’re talking to people, and you kind of get them to understand that, they could be creating barriers, you can talk about the sorts of the disability, but I like the social model of disability around this, rather than the medical model.

And this is what I try and share with people; No one’s disabled, we all have impairments, and differences, and we’re all wonderfully diverse. And if you don’t consider that you disable people in the design by that whole point of removing them.

Then I also try and get them to think about themselves, I mean, we’ve both got assistive technology on our face, but we would never turn around and associate that with a disability, but we have an impairment with our eyes. And I start to get people to look at the things that they do, and say, “Well, you have situational transient impairment”, some people have that permanently.

I remember back in the day,with BBC Sport, when they first started building the sports applications, we had this conversation with some product managers. They thought it was a quite a worthy thing. They didn’t really understand the worthwhileness of it. And so I said to them, “Look, think about your audience on a Saturday, where are they? Where are the majority of the audience?” and they said, “Well, actually, we have a huge spike on a Saturday, because people are at games and matches, they’re taking their mobile phones out. This is why we’re gonna move from mobile web into an app, we think there’s a lot of opportunity there”.

And so I said, Well, let’s think about color contrast. Because color contrast, if we don’t get that, if we don’t max that out in that situation, we’re gonna have a problem. Because what is the one thing that people do when they’re out about with their mobile phone, and they’re actively using it a lot? They turn the brightness of the screen down. And so they are vision impairing themselves. And I don’t use the word ‘visually’ impaired because a friend of mine asked me, who is blind. “Are you accusing me of being ugly?!”, I remember that and it stuck with me in my head. And I’ve always gone “Oh, God, I can never say that phrase again!” And I know he was only pulling my leg. But I’ve always felt awkward about since.

But you know, getting back to the thing, if you’re not doing high contrast, and people can’t turn the screen down as far as the brightness down as far as they want, which means they’re going to chew through their battery faster, which means we’re going to the lose engagement opportunity, because sooner or later, they’ll either stop using this or they run out of battery, so it’s called user behavior in that context. And there are so many examples of this.

It’s interesting, so many things have come out of those needs. You know, the first ever the typewriter was designed for a blind Countess who to write to her lover and not have someone else know. And so she got a friend of hers to create a writing machine for her that she could access. And the human need, created typing, writing machines, the first ones, and so accessibility – so much stuff is born out of it.

Remote controls for TVs, I think that came out from, what I originally remember, from a need from American hospitals after someone did a time and motion study in the 1950s or 60s of the amount of times nurses were spending changing the channels for the patients when they should be nursing. And they weren’t able to just stick a cable, or just hand across or a clicker or whatever. So now they can go up and down and give the control to the person who can’t move out of the bed to change the channel. And suddenly we’ve got tons of results!

How do you think the internet will change over the next 10 years, and what specific features or habits that exist now do you hope will be seen as from their time?

Everyone who tries to predict this is wrong! Or it will happen in the next three months!

It’s a great question. I think Tomorrow’s World once was trying to predict the future. And this is going back in the 1970s, early 80s, or whatever – it might have been the 1970s.

And they were trying to predict computers in the future in the year 2000. And they said something like, “There could be by the year 2000, up to 100 computers in the UK, and there might be one in a town near you”! Wow. You know, it was it was right in the early days, and I just love how wrong they were and how you could understimate progress.

But, there’s a lot of things I hope for, you know, and, and I think a lot of it is to do with the generational aspect of who is coming through and working in this space and how this changes.

A lot of the problems we have around inclusion, if I’m going to stick with that, as a topic around this, a lot of the problems we have are because of people like me. I’m in my 50s. And I think I had quite privileged upbringing in a lot of ways around inclusion, because from age two, we lived on the site of a special needs school that was a residential in South Manchester. And I just grew up with loads of kids who are autistic, and whatever. And they were just kids and I was a kid, we all played together, and it was great.

And so the whole thing is, I know I never had a problem with this but the problem is the education system and the way society was. People weren’t in the workplace, they weren’t in mainstream education. And people of my generation and bit younger and a bit older, grew up without knowing anyone, unless there was someone in your family and it was a difficult thing.

And then when it comes to actually understanding inclusion, even though there is an enormous amount of will to be able to do it from a lot of people, they have no idea how to deal with this. They’ve had no life experience.

Whereas, the more times I’m spending speaking with young designers and developers, I’m just amazed how mature they are in their thinking around diversity. At, 25, I was just an idiot. I mean, there was no other way to describe it. But with hair and a lot thinner!

I didn’t have that kind of worldview, the information they get hold of, the conversations they have now. And so I have this enormous amount of hope for the future that actually people are going to understand more about this. And I think whatever the technologies, and the technologies will advance in any way that I don’t understand. I don’t like the term futurologists. But there are people who professionally make up stuff. I’m no sage around this. But I think there’s hopefully going to be more and more of a cultural shift in the digital sphere.

If you’re with someone who needs to check how accessible their website is, but you only have five, but they only have five minutes. Talk us through how you go about showing them.

First off, just try and use it with keyboard only – just get in there with the keyboard? That’s the first test. If you can’t do that, then pretty much everything else will probably be stuffed.

It’s sometimes those really simple things. There was a wonderful little bit of trolling that I think Hayden Pickering did last year. Was it last year or this year? I’m getting too old to remember even when they happen. It was sometime during lockdown. But during that period, he made his website not work if you had JavaScript switched on. And lots of developers utilized the stuff that you had on his website. And they were all complaining on social media going “I can’t get to it. It’s not fair. I don’t know how to switch JavaScript off”!

And he was saying, “are you understanding what you’re doing ? If you have created something that people can’t access, their fallback position is to switch off JavaScript and they don’t know how”. So they get nothing, you know, you can’t turn around and say “it was underlying blah, blah”, you have to get it right. And he made a made a really wonderful point by doing that.

Put yourself in a few situations and just see what it is like, and I think sometimes also, if you have the luxury of doing it – and I like to think of people who have experienced barriers as experts in in their own, life experience and lived experience, have the level of expertise – but spend some time with someone and get to see what their coping strategies are and how they do with the changes.

When we consider the adoption of accessible digital products, what do you think is the biggest challenge?

This is this is something that I don’t think, in some ways I’m qualified to answer. Because I like watching what goes on and what other people are doing and how they’re approaching stuff. I have one thing, or a few areas, which I of focus on, which are the things that I kind of nerd out on. And I think, you know, okay, I might not have to have the ‘be-all or end-all’ idea about any of it. But they’re the areas where I like to listen and understand and build up an opinion on.

And, by the way, I don’t think any one should turn up with the answer. That’s one of the big problems with the whole thing – we all turn up trying to solution everything. And people should spend more time asking good questions.

It’s like, you say so many times you see things, “Hang on a minute, have we actually checked the questions ? We’re, presuming a lot of stuff here.” I think this is when we have problems when people start talking, you know, absolute rot about Comic Sans and serifs versus sans serifs. Well, where did you get that information from? Can you tell me? Can you show me? Can you evidence it?

Oh, no, no, no, apparently, it’s just the truth! No, it’s not, the serif thing is never been proven. There was only one study, as far as I’m aware, where it actually was conclusive. And that’s when there was studying of fonts on very 1970s – 80s kind of main mainframe computers that had green screen, CRT monitors, and whose software could not render serifs.

And so when he tried to use a serif font on it, it was just horrible. So the studies worked out that actually legibility on these things were Sans-serif. And, and then everyone’s kind of forgotten the context, and taken what they think is the truth. And, and then are just carrying on delivering it. And it’s absolutely rubbish.

There’s no evidence behind any of it. But there’s those kinds of problems that we have, often with engaging with things on ‘what to do’, but watching what organizations like, ‘valuable 500’ and ‘Business Disability Forum’, are doing where they’re literally signing people up at the top, which is the most fantastic thing to do. Because then, , people may deal with the fallout!

It’s getting organizations to turn around and challenging them saying, “why wouldn’t you do this?”, and, and getting them to turn around and go,”Actually, we should be doing this, you know.” Tis opportunity as far as cultural growth as an organization is concerned, it’s opportunity as far as reach and share, it’s opportunity, as far as brand is concerned. There’s so much opportunity here.

What is one thing that every single person can do or learn to play a part in the progression towards an accessible internet?

It doesn’t matter if you know anything about accessibility at all. For me, as long as you have the will and you engage and say “I want to know, why wouldn’t I?” “I want to deal with it”.

So I think the one thing that you need to do if you’re working in any organization, large or small, is literally find your find your tribe around this

Do the cultural thing first. It’s it’s one of the things that it came about, kind of by accident at the BBC, we formed a Champions network, we actually did it twice, because it kind of fell apart at one point when I went off on a sabbatical, but it was attached to YouView which we were building at the time, and we weren’t having it properly managed, etc. And it kind of fell apart a bit, but we got it back together again.

Find your people, because when I started, I come from the design industry before coming in as a brand manager. And I wasn’t a developer. And accessibility was new for me and I was coming into a massive organization. Going into a new division I didn’t know anyone or what was going on.

And I just did something quite cheeky and I contacted the central for comms team and said, “Can I send out an email to everyone in the division?” Most of us were in West London at the time. In W12. We’re not there now, we’re all over the country now. But most of us were there.

And and they were like, “yeah, yeah, you can we got permission from from the senior management” and I just sent this little email and I got a little bit of budget together and I said, “Thursday, next week, on lunchtime, I’m going to be in the board room in the media centre on my own, with a load of sandwiches and tea so do come along if; One – you want a free lunch or Two – you’re interested in accessibility. You don’t need any expertise or feel free if you feel sorry for me because I’ve got no friends.” And we packed the room. And it was just extraordinary the amount of people that turned up, just wanting to know what was what.

You know, “I’ve heard about the word accessibility, I don’t know anything about it, what’s going on? ”

Suddenly, I had this massive group of people who were interested. And I met some extraordinary people in there who were just involved forever. Ian Hamilton who runs GA conf and is one of the biggest names in games accessibility was one of the people who rocked up. And Will Duggan, nd all sorts of people were in that room. It was extraordinary. And found out, they were all trying to drive little things within their teams and trying to create change. And it’s like, “well, we can do bigger things together. And we can learn from each other”.

Al was trying to build a first web web website using CSS, the BBC had never done it before. And I found out about all the change and the benefits that using CSS instead of table-based layouts, could have

I went and had a chat with him and said, “well we need this on everything”. My problem now is to is to make the case and to pull this forward, and push, push the organization and eventually, I won the case, getting the iPlayer built using CSS, and that’s where it started, because the iPlayer was a place where we built it all in one place.

And then once we’ve proven it, it was the petri dish for accessibility for the BBC, for the larger products, and then then it kind of fell out from there and went other places.

And, and I think it’s one of those things find your people, find everyone else get together regularly and talk, get a channel together on Slack or discord, or wherever else you use, and share stuff, find things that you find interesting and keep the conversation going.

Because if the conversation is going, then things get changed. It’s not about compliance, or reading guidelines or whatever, all that will fall out. But someone will go, “I’ve got a problem”, and someone else will go ” we might have a fix because we saw that problem recently ourselves”. And you find that, you learn from everyone else, and they’re all teaching each other and it’s a brilliant way of doing cultural change within an organization.

Accessibility at the end of it, it’s a change management problem. It’s not about compliance. It’s about it’s about culture. And culture eats strategy for breakfast. I think, you know, that’s, that’s absolutely right for accessibility.

It doesn’t matter if you know anything about accessibility at all. For me, as long as you have the will and you engage and say “I want to know, why wouldn’t I?” “I want to deal with it”.

So I think the one thing that you need to do if you’re working in any organization, large or small, is literally find your find your tribe around this

You know, “I’ve heard about the word accessibility, I don’t know anything about it, what’s going on? ”

Suddenly, I had this massive group of people who were interested. And I met some extraordinary people in there who were just involved forever. Ian Hamilton who runs GA Conf and is one of the biggest names in games accessibility was one of the people who rocked up. And Will Duggan, and all sorts of people were in that room. It was extraordinary. And found out, they were all trying to drive little things within their teams and trying to create change. And it’s like, “well, we can do bigger things together. And we can learn from each other”.

And then once we’ve proven it, it was the petri dish for accessibility for the BBC, for the larger products, and then then it kind of fell out from there and went other places.