One line of code can’t fix your website

Hi, everyone. This is Silktide’s One line of code can’t fix your website: Redux, because we did this in CSUN. But, I’ve added some stuff, and you’re going to get that kind of experience, plus a little extra. Main point here is, how do you convince your boss there’s no silver bullet to make your website accessible?

So our objectives for today, we’re going to do the introduction, as always. That’s mostly about me. I have a disclaimer I need to put on this, and we’ll talk about why. We’re going to talk about the perception of overlays inside the industry, the complexity of overlays and what they actually are. Why this is actually a dangerous conversation.

See, that ties into the disclaimer. What’s coming in the future, and then we’re going to talk about talking points. So you’ve got like a rundown on the main points you can use to have this discussion. So, as I said, all about me! I started making websites back in 1996. Yes. I’m old. I like to think I don’t look it. I love teaching tech. I got my Microsoft Certified Trainer back in 1997. I just didn’t keep it up to date. I have over a decade in accessibility now, and I’m basically a huge nerd. I view my role as a rabble rouser, I’m trying to change hearts and minds, and I will use whatever way I can to make it work.

Fun fact about me is that I was immortalized as a minor character in a video game. And since everyone ends up asking, it was World of Warcraft. And just briefly, for anyone who cares, because it’s also on the slide. I have long red hair, I wear tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and I have bright pink kitty ear headphones.

So on to the disclaimer. This is a meme of Doctor Evil doing air quotes. It says: “Disclaimer… right”.

I need to mention this because I am going to intentionally not use the names of any of the things I am citing. I will have a bunch of articles and things that I reference, but due to the nature of the world we live in, I have gone outside of my way to ensure that I don’t cross any lines.

Again, there’s a whole section on why this is a dangerous conversation. But particularly I use “Disclaimer… right” because I say “right” a lot, and I’m just going to own that. This is actually a sticker that my company produced and gave out internally. So that we could all put it on our laptops. Because, as I said, I say right a lot.

So brace yourselves. This talk is a bit of a tightrope. So this is an image of someone who’s barefoot with their pants rolled up, walking across a tightrope in what looks to be some sort of amazing gorge. This is a tough conversation. The reality is that, like, well, a lot of us have very extreme opinions on this topic.

Myself included. It is dangerous to talk about it, and, there are a number of people who have been sued and other things like that for expressing their views on this particular aspect of software. So we’re going to try to be as fair and as reasonable as possible today. So we’re going to start with how the industry views overlays.

That’s probably most of you and me. So looking at some of the headlines. I’m gonna read some of these out for you. Is there a silver bullet for ADA website accessibility? Sorry, but the answer is no. Website overlays don’t work well, if at all, for mobile. That’s an interesting one. Why accessibility overlays do not improve site accessibility.

Accessibility overlays: Automation that’s too good to be true. Are you using an accessibility overlay to help disabled users? Don’t! If we need to, we will include the deck because there are links to all of these articles. So maybe we should make a note of that. At Silktide, we definitely have taken the attitude that we don’t like accessibility overlays.

This is an article that was written by a colleague of mine that says: Accessibility overlays are evil and they need to die. So I think it’s pretty universal that the industry does not like overlays. And when it comes to Silktide, we did stickers when we went to CSUN in 2023. We had a white text on black: Friends don’t let friends use overlays. This year we had a much bigger sticker, but it’s pop art of someone whispering to someone who looks shocked that says: Friends don’t let friends use overlays. They’re really popular stickers. You’d be surprised.

A couple other headlines I want to mention, and again, I think this is why we should share the deck.

The European Disability Forum and the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, that’s the IAAP. They made a joint statement on accessibility overlays. It’s really worth looking at. And additionally, the European Accessibility Act Compliance Guide actually specifies that overlays are non-compliant. And I think these are really important details. But is it really so black and white? Is it simply that overlays are evil and they need to die?

Right? Or maybe there’s some more nuance to this. We’re going to start with the three types of overlays, which I think of as the box, the AI, and the Band-Aid. Because when we talk about overlays, we’re actually talking about a fairly broad topic. And most of the time we all think we mean one thing, and it’s really not that simple anymore.

This is what I meant to build the complexity of overlays. So let’s start with the box. It looks a bit like this. Can’t stress enough. This is not anyone’s software. I had someone make this for me, because I wanted to give you an idea of what they look like without actually using one. So the idea here is that you have, like, presets usually like, oh, ADHD or keyboard navigation or screen reader users or… And then you see things like content settings often where it lets you zoom in or change your cursor size or the font size or hide the images.

And this one has pause animations, but you often see like ones that are based on movement, right? The problem here is pretty simple that like almost all of these settings are available to users inside their own setup, right? Whether it’s the browser settings or their operating system, if they need this stuff, they probably set it up the way they need it to be.

You’re not actually adding anything. Y’know, and it looks good, and we’re going to dive into that in a second, but like, is it actually helping is the first thing you need to ask yourself. And do I know what it actually does? Because their behaviors are unpredictable. I can’t stress this enough. Like you don’t know what it might be doing.

I won’t name this company. But I do have a couple of screenshots that are from actual overlays. This is a screenshot from my phone, even though it’s been put in here, you know, with definitely masculine-looking hands. So here’s the thing. I was pressing the plus button, which was supposed to make the font bigger.

Right. So on the left is where things started it. And then I hit the button a bunch of times, and this is what I ended up with, right? So you can see it made the text for the search button bigger, and it made the privacy button bigger, but nothing else. It’s all literally the same size, right?

It’s only affected this tiny amount of the text on the page, even though what it’s supposed to be doing is making all of the text bigger.

This came up yesterday. So, this is a screenshot from a site. Again, I’m not naming names, but this is the focus state for the Convenient Care link, right? Because I was kind of cross about it when I saw it. You can see it’s not necessarily ideal, but they have an overlay and they were like, When you use our overlay, and you hit— I think it was Alt+1. They’re like, It takes care of these problems. And I was like, does it?

So this is what it does. I drone on about focus states all the time. Right? They need to be a bright contrasting color. You know, you need to be able to like, look away and look back and still have an idea of where you are.

Right? So the black on the blue actually isn’t that bad. However, if you look at it, it’s actually making it hard to read the words. This is blown up, but you know, it was much smaller on my screen when I took the screenshots. Right. You need to know what it’s doing. Also, they claimed that it was fixing their Learn more links.

It didn’t do anything to them, and this one really caught my attention. When you turned on the screen reader option, which defaulted to also turn on keyboard navigation, it changed things like this focus state. Right? But it also turned off the Skip to content links. Why? Nobody knows. No one likes bad surprises. Like, you need to know what’s going on.

Surprises can be good, but bad surprises are not. You know, and if you’re insisting that to use the site and have an accessible experience, you have to use the functions of the overlay, you better be sure you know what they’re doing. You know, it’s your website. There’s no reason you can’t check. I also wanted to mention this because, again, not naming names.

This is one of the ones I was disturbed by, particularly what it was calling things. So the second half of this says “Blind Users, in parentheses, Screen Reader. Optimize website for screen readers. This profile adjusts the website to be compatible with screen readers such as Jaws, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack. A screen reader is software that is installed on the blind user’s computer and smartphone and website should ensure compatibility with it.”

And it says, Note: This profile prompts automatically to screen readers. That means that it’s sending messages and interrupting to say this is how you enable it. Right. Which you wouldn’t notice unless you had a screen reader. I was perturbed by the fact that they specified blind users, and to the point of saying that a screen reader software that is installed on the blind user’s computer.

Lots of people use screen readers. Visual users use it. If you have ADHD, a screen reader can actually be really useful. So, yeah. You might also want to check the language they’re using when you install one of these things. Right. Moving on to the next type. Band-Aids. I think of these as the quick fix, right.

There’s a reason you might want to use a Band-Aid, right? Because as the slide says, corporations move at the speed of suck. Right? This is attributed to a very wise former boss of mine. Now, the thing with the Band-Aid is that these are the ones that allow you to make a change, right? They use JavaScript. They allow you to say, actually, I wish that image had alt text.

So, you know, let me use this software to apply it. Right? I fundamentally think this is a good idea. I really do. I think that the Band-Aids can be really useful. I think that if you’re dealing with bureaucracy or it takes like a number of steps to get things changed on the website, like, y’know, there are places where it’s quite a lengthy period to get anything made different.

And if you have an option to say, like, I’m going to make some quick changes while I wait for them to be fixed fully, you know, that’s valid, right? This can be really useful and really powerful… But you don’t want to overdo it. Part of the drawback here is that, like the more you use it, it will actually slow things down.

You know, I don’t know where that tipping point is for any particular product, but it’s a thing, right? And it’s not a fix. Right? It’s a Band-Aid. Like, it’s a way around it. But if a user, for example, turns off JavaScript, which some do for privacy reasons, then it doesn’t function at all. Right. So all the changes you made aren’t actually being implemented like universally.

But again, as I said, Band-Aids for me, I think are actually kind of good, right? Like, there are use cases where it’s quite great to have them as an option. The third kind is the A.I. Now the slide says when you use ChatGPT, you check the results. You need to do that here too, right? This whole idea that, like, you can use an A.I. and it’s going to magically fix your headings and your alt text and all this kind of stuff.

Right? You need to look, right. You need to be aware of what it’s changing, and you need to ensure that you have control. If it makes changes that you don’t think are good, right. So. I know the messaging is always like, this will just take care of all your problems for you. It’s not working that way yet. But this is the one that people… The box and the A.I. are the ones people tend to associate with overlays.

Right? Even though the Band-Aid is, like, actually one of the types of them. And sometimes you find that they’ll actually combine these things, right, where they’re like, well, you get the box, and A.I. is doing this stuff and you get this Band-Aid thing you can use. They’ll use different names for these things. But I was surprised by how often they try to combine them into one thing.

You know, when I was like, actually, these things are separate. So the simplest example I can give you for my problem with A.I. currently— stress on currently —is that generally it’s being used for things like alt text and it’s just not very good yet. I’m going to give you some examples. This is the curb cut effect from Sketchplanations that I use all the time because it says “When we design for disabilities, we make things better for everyone”.

And fundamentally, I agree with this sentiment. Right. And this is about how when you lower the curve, which was done for people in wheelchairs. Right? It actually made life better for people with kids and strollers or bicycles or wheelie suitcases or even that kid in the back with the skateboard. Right. Now, I used a number of A.I. tools to get some alt text for this, and it gave me “A cartoon of people walking in a park with a curb” which I didn’t think was that great.

One of them actually gave me a line about people with wheelchairs, plural. Right. Which really caught my attention because there’s only one person in a wheelchair in this image. So I was very confused about what it was seeing that I wasn’t. This is a graph because, again, like, we all want to know, like, if I give you something, what are you going to do?

One of them gave me “A graph on a white surface” which may be one of the worst alt text descriptions I’ve ever seen. One of them used the title “The UK’s stuttering GDP recovery” from this. But neither of those are actually useful for telling me what this graph is or why I care, or what the information it’s conveying is.

And I love this one like, so much because it’s such an iconic image, at least here in Britain. This is Queen Elizabeth the Second. But the first time I used it, it gave me “A person wearing a blue hat and a blue coat” which, well, kind of. She’s wearing a blue dress, a blue hat with these flowers on it, with yellow centers.

One of the other things I got was “Queen Elizabeth the Second sitting in the House of Commons” but this is not the House of Commons, right? Someone pointed out to me, this is the House of Lords. Apparently the color gives it away. It’s like green versus burgundy. Also that the queen apparently never goes to the House of Commons, and it’s a thing.

So I was like, oh, wow. For any Americans watching, it’s kind of like confusing the Senate and the House of Representatives. Right? But the A.I. as we all know has a tendency to speak with authority, even when it’s wrong. Right? When I was walking around CSUN, I saw this line that was like, talking about that.

And it was like, you know, how they hallucinate or say things that aren’t true with authority. They’re like, Just like my college roommate! The reality is like, yeah, humans do this too. But we can’t rely on the A.I. yet is my point, right? Because as I’m very fond of saying, alt text is all about context, right?

And you have to remember that a lot of the time when you’re putting alt text onto an image that’s, you know, embedded in a webpage, you’re interrupting, right? You’re interrupting the flow of the text on the page to tell them what the image is. Right? So we need to think about what is good alt text and what isn’t good alt text.

And this is a level of nuance that you really currently cannot expect an A.I. to understand, right? I use this slide a lot. Of the whole, like, don’t say “A red headed woman and a black cat” because that’s just useless. You know, maybe you would say it’s “Jessica Chambers with her awesome rescue cat, Salem” maybe?

It really depends on the context of the page, but I’d probably say that in almost every case I can think of for this particular cartoon image of me and my cat, that it shouldn’t have alt text, because it’s probably just an interruption in providing information people don’t need. As I am always coming back to this, “A redheaded woman with a black cat”.

Right? Like the amount of alt text I see that sounds just like that, you know, is pretty amazing. When you write alt text, my biggest rule of thumb is this. Imagine that you were reading it to someone over the phone right? So like, you know, or someone’s read it to you. When you hear a redheaded woman with a black cat, what are you picturing?

Is it Jessica Rabbit? Because that’s what popped up in my head.

The reality is that A.I. is getting smarter. To quote Oliver, our CEO, AI is as bad as it will ever be today. But it’s getting better all the time, right? So the problem is, it’s just it’s not there yet. Right. And relying on it today to do things it might do in a year or a couple of years, right, it’s just— it’s not worth the risk.

So realistically, all of these tools can be really useful, right? Particularly the Band-Aid, as I said. But at the end of the day, they’re not actually a real solution. You can’t rely on them to sort your problems out. But as I said, Band-Aids, kind of useful. I’m going to say that a lot, because I really do think that there is some nuance to this discussion, rather than just overlays are bad.

But they are really hated. So let’s talk about why they’re hated. The first thing I want to talk about is, nothing about us without us. So this concept applies in a number of different areas, but when it comes to disability and assistive technology, the idea is that you shouldn’t be making products, tools, laws, without actually involving people with disabilities.

The idea is that, like, you will get a better product and a better fit, you know, and a better outcome if you actually talk to the people who are going to need it and who are going to use it. Right. Part of the reason I noticed that overlay saying that it alerts screen reader users that it’s there, is because there have been some users who have made specific plugins to turn off some of the overlays, because if you didn’t enable it, it would just keep repeating every 15 seconds, like “Use this key combination to enable it” you know, and it made them unable to use the website unless they did enable it, and they didn’t like what it was doing. And that wouldn’t have happened if they had just spoken to some people who use screen readers and been like, Let’s look at this product together and make sure it’s actually helping you. You know, like, is it giving you what you need? And from what I can tell, pretty much none of these overlay companies have been doing that, right.

And it’s kind of a thing. The next thing you want to talk about, is some of the other messaging. Right? So we’ve got: Accessibility overlays: panacea placebo or poison? People with disabilities say this A.I. tool is making the web worse for them. Truth in advertising does not exist for overlay vendors. And from the New York Times is: For blind internet users, the fix can be worse than the flaws. So they are talking about it, and whether or not this is improving things or making it worse.

The messaging. This is the thing I always come back to, like, why are you hated? The messaging. Right. Making claims like, install this one line of code and we will protect you from lawsuits and we have a legal team who will back you up, etc. etc. None of this is real, right? They guarantee compliance. It’s not real. None of this is real.

And I think it’s not just frustrating. I think it’s actually damaging. You know, it’s damaging to people, right? It’s damaging to the companies who don’t realize when they’re putting this stuff on their website that they could be actually making more barriers. Right. And they’re totally taking advantage of people’s ignorance. Speaking of things that came up recently.

So I’ve been busy censoring all the things that I shouldn’t say that came on this thing. This is a post from an overlay company on Twitter recently. They’re quoting someone else, right? This lovely lady named Brooke. And what they put up was:

“I’m super impressed with my experience on the censored website. I was doing a little retail therapy and I noticed the web company— That’s the overlay, that’s why it’s censored —I absolutely love it when companies go the extra mile to make their sites accessible for all. The shoes are cute and comfy too, by the way.” It is a shoe company. So I read this. And being me with my opinionated self, I got a little frustrated and was like, is this fake?

So I went digging and I found her on LinkedIn. So this, again censored, is the whole story of what she wrote. And there is a reason I’m sharing this with you, so just bear with me for a moment. It says “I’m super impressed with my experience on the blank website. I was doing a little retail therapy and I noticed a link at the bottom of their site that said Accessibility Adjustments.

When I clicked, it brought me to a page where I could customize my website experience based on my needs like ADHD, seizure, safety, vision impairment, etc. I’d never seen this before on a retail site. I checked Nike and Walmart and several other stores but not have this level of customization. Looks like the plugin or web company is called— blanked out the name —I absolutely love it when companies go the extra mile to make their sites accessible for all. The shoes are cute and comfy too, by the way. Take a peek. Link to the site.” Right. Now, here’s the thing. She is coming from a place of ignorance. She says that she clicked on it. It was like, oh wow, right?

You could customize the website based on your needs, which she doesn’t have. Right. And then she says she went to Nike and Walmart and a bunch of other places, and none of them had this level of customization… because they don’t need it! Like, she really is coming from a good place, right? Like, she really thinks this is a good thing, right?

And she’s promoting it because she thinks it’s a good thing. I’ve always wondered if people think that if you put the overlay on your site, right, and you’ve got the little badge that says, I care about accessibility. And definitely it works on some people, right? And that’s something I need everyone to be aware of. Right. This is part of the content I added because this is something we need to talk about, right?

It’s coming from a place of ignorance, right? It’s not malice in most cases. It’s just they don’t understand. And in the particular case of this website. Oh my, the things on this website. This is a blown up screenshot of part of it, which I’m pretty sure you can’t identify it from, so, yay. See, I said it was a shoe company.

So what you’re seeing in the center of this carousel is a picture of what looks like a maybe a running trail. Right? But there’s nothing in it, and it’s because it’s actually an animated video, right? So that one— in the whole carousel, there’s only one that does movement, and it’s that one. And so when steps in with a pair of shoes and then steps out, and when I tried to screenshot, it was apparently right as they stepped out, which I thought was funny, which is why I’m sharing it.

But the other thing I want you to notice is it actually has this little lozenge thing up at the top and it says “In the Wild” right? And it’s tiny, right? You can’t read it. And then in huge font it says “When you step in, things are always looking up”. Now, this website has so many problems, ranging from auto playing videos. The overlay that’s on it. If you turn off motion, which should turn off the videos, it doesn’t do anything. They all still play… yeah. It kind of just goes on and on. It was enough that when I sent it to one of my colleagues and he pointed out that we should take some notes, because we’re replacing our demo site with something called Fake University, where we’ve intentionally broken it in all sorts of ways.

Right. But they’ve managed to be kind of worse overall than the site that we have designed to be terrible. And that scares me because we’ve got a lady who, again, from like, what to me seems to be a really good place in her heart is saying they have this overlay and I think this means they care about accessibility and that makes them better than, say, Nike.

Right? Because she doesn’t know, right? This site’s awful. Like, I would seriously be horrified. You know, I kind of want to tear it apart and tell them, but that’s the problem, right? Is that all this messaging of like, look how great this is, look how it does all this stuff, when we know it’s part of your browser settings.

And it may even be overwriting user settings, right? We know there’s so many problems, but if you were someone who doesn’t know all of those things, then it can look like something really great.

And that snake oil thing is what makes everyone the most angry, right? The constant messaging of like, This is great, this will fix your website. This takes care of all your problems. Just, you know, install this thing and you’re good to go. And within 48 hours, everything will be fine, right? No. but we also know that it’s working.

Right? Like, people believe this, and it’s really infuriating.

Right. This is a picture from… Oh, great. My brain just shut down. A famous old TV show, and it says “Danger, Will Robinson!” because I kind of want to talk about the companies and why this is a dangerous conversation. So this image is, the blind statue for justice holding the scales, but her mouth is covered up by a sticker that says SLAPP, which stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, otherwise known as a SLAPP suit.

Right. I’d say the answer’s in the name, except it’s kind of long. What this is, is a way to silence your critics. Depending on what state in America you’re in, there may actually be something you can sue back for. As in, like, I can prove that this is this kind of gag thing. And therefore, you know, I’m gonna have the courts punish you for bringing this kind of suit.

For example, that’s how it works in New York. If you’re found to have created a SLAPP suit, they will come at you and find you. Which is a good thing, because these are bad. So the example I’m going to give you, and this is the one of the only times I’m going to mention a name, is Adrian Roselli.

If you work in the industry and do things like hanging out too much on Twitter. You may know who he is. He’s been at this a very long time, and he is one of my little, like, accessibility heroes. Now, he was sued, by Audio Eye, because he said their product didn’t work. It’s essentially what he did.

He went to the internet and was like, this doesn’t work. You know, and he wrote some blog article about it. And they sued him, and they tied him up in court and dragged the thing out. And they let it go, in January of this year. But I keep thinking about how much time, you know, the emotional toil, you know, like between the money, the emotions and the time.

Like, these things are horrible. They are designed for a bigger, more… A company with more money to be able to push around smaller people. Right. Because if you don’t have the money to fight them in court, there’s nothing you can do, right? They just tell you to stop talking. And what are you going to do other than stop talking?

And silencing conversation like that really makes me angry. However, I am so keenly aware of it that you can see this whole time I’m trying to avoid anybody’s names or anything that’s specific, because I don’t want to risk one of them coming at me. I’m going to say something slightly mean. They do have a tendency to fixate on sole people, right?

If you’re part of a company, they’re less interested in suing you because they know you’ve got better resources. And that makes me a little sick too. It’s not just happening in the U.S. right? I wish SLAPP suits against literally accessibility advocates was a problem only here. But it’s not. In France— I can’t name them because I don’t want to risk it —there’s one that has created multiple lawsuits against individuals for saying their overlay isn’t the answer. But in France, they call it poursuites bâillons, which is gagging pursuits, right? They’re not even holding back. They know exactly what it is. And they didn’t give it a dumb name like SLAPP. Right?

In this particular case, I’m a huge fan of Hamilton. So what you’re seeing here, is Lafayette, the guy who played him in the musical and the actual Lafayette, in a painting. But that chilling effect on the court conversation is a thing, right? It makes it so people are very scared of having public conversations about what overlays can and cannot do. Right? Because they’re scared, right?

It’s like I said, it’s one thing if you’ve got a big company behind you so that you can say, this is how it is, right? And know that, like, it’s not going to be a problem if this gets dragged out over multiple years. But it’s a very different thing if you’re like a single person with your small business, like that’s not okay.

And it fundamentally is a problem, right? And companies are doing this. And part of the reason I keep mentioning it is because I want you to think about corporate social responsibility. Right. CSR is a big deal these days, and companies do seem to care. Right. So one of the things that you need to think about is whether or not you want to be associated and affiliated with a company that, for example, brings SLAPP suits, right?

And I think it’s something people need to think about and need to talk about. Because if you can say this company sues people who disagree with them, you know, like, that’s a thing. And like, if I see a company dealing with the ones I know who do that, I’m going to feel differently about them. You know, but I also realize maybe they don’t know.

They’re probably not paying attention. Again, I said, so much of this comes down to ignorance, not malice. Right? So what about the future? Where are we going? And what’s with this hand basket? That is a joke. A.I. is getting smarter. It really is. I don’t think it’s going to be quick before it fixes things better, but, you know, I don’t honestly know, right?

Maybe it’s going to get awesome at alt text. Maybe we can teach it that it needs to look at the whole page context and then think about the image. Maybe? I don’t know. But to be honest, when I was younger, I remember watching Starship Troopers, right, and this is a screenshot from that movie, where, there was a voice saying, Would you like to know more?

Right, and I got really excited because I thought they were suggesting something else, right? But you can see in the screenshot there’s a very prominent mouse cursor. Right. And in the movie, the mouse cursor comes from “Top news” and then clicks on “Would you like to know more?” and I was so disappointed because I thought they were showing us that in the future you could talk to your computer.

And I was like, oh, that’s going to be so amazing! Like, this is everything I ever wanted. Uh, no. This image is a meme from the same movie, and it says “Desire to know more intensifies”. The thing is, I do think that’s the future, right? I think that’s where we’re going. I think we’re going to be able to have conversations with websites.

I think we’re going to have conversations with our computers. Right? We’re getting there. It’s not there yet. Right. We’re in a situation where Adobe is testing “Talk to your PDF” Right? How cool is that? Right. You can use ChatGPT right now to say, Hey, here’s this like, you know, I’ll give an example… Here’s the documentation from the EU on the new European accessibility laws.

Right, and you can then say, here’s the document. Right. And then ask it questions about it, like, can you summarize this for me? What about this particular case? What about that. Right. And it’s surprisingly accurate if you give it the document. Right. But you can take any kind of like, academic paper or research that you fundamentally would probably potentially find hard to understand, you know, written by, I don’t know, physicists, and pump that into ChatGPT and be like, explain this to me.

And it can. Right. So, like, I think we’re not that far off for when we’ll be able to talk to it better, right, in a more interactive way. So this image is a different cartoony version of probably me, talking to a variation of Hal from the… Space… Oh, God. I’m having the worst time today.

Famous movie! And it says Pal 9000 plus because we are making a joke about Hal. But who knows how this is going to work? So this one actually has the same image, except the cartoon character looks a little disturbed because the Pal 9000 is saying “Daisy, Daisy…” So A.I. is going to get better at the automated remediation.

It will. Right. I am looking forward to this. It says, are we there yet? Right. I think this would be great. I really do. I have questions about how much it will actually be able to do. Right. Like, I don’t think it’s going to be some like, instant like, oh, everything’s awesome now. But I do think it should be able to help us more, and more successfully than it does right now.

But automated testing can’t identify all the barriers to usability. If you come to any of my webinars, you know Silktide does automated testing, right? But we know that it can’t identify all the barriers, and I’ve been saying this for years. Right? It’s not like we’re trying to hide it. At the end of the day, you have to do the work, right?

Even humans doing manual testing may not identify all the barriers to usability. Intersectionality is a thing, right? And even if you adhere to every single guideline in WCAG, there are still instances where you may have actually created barriers or overlooked some. Because again, you have to do the work. You HAVE to do the work. But no one wants to hear this.

At the end of the day, digital content accessibility is not the responsibility of the user. It’s the responsibility of the website owner. That’s from that joint statement from the IAAP and the European Disability Forum. Right. I think this is a really important message. So let’s recap. We’re just going to gently go through some talking points. So first thing I have to stress, you have to let go of your anger.

No matter how passionate you are about this, how angry you are, I’m sure my passion has come through a few times, you’re never going to convince anyone that they should give up and let you rain on their parade and ruin their “I thought everything was perfect now” if you do it with aggression, right? It’s not going to work.

You’ve got to let go of the anger, which is why this is an image of Emperor Palpatine, who was like “Let the anger flow through you” because you can’t. It’s not going to work. So, some talking points for the box, right? Unpredictable behavior. Right. You don’t know what this thing is going to do. It has the potential to override user settings, which is one of the worst things you can do.

If someone has set up their computer and their assistive technology the way they need it to be, don’t touch it. Right. Don’t override what they’ve said that they need. Generally speaking, it probably isn’t adding any features. I mean, it looks cool, but it’s not doing anything that you couldn’t have done, you know, inside your operating system and browser.

And that would be universal. Whereas this is per website. And at the end of the day, it still requires actual fixing. This doesn’t fix anything. The Band-Aid. Right. This is your quick fix, right? The bureaucracy shortcut, the thing I actually think is great. Overreliance on it becomes a concern. You can’t easily change providers. This is something to bear in mind.

You will be essentially locked in, because there is no easy way to go from one provider to another provider. You have to stick with them or you’ll be starting over from scratch right?

And because when do you rip the Band-Aid off, the problems are still there. It still requires actual fixing. Right?

The A.I. This one requires human judgment. You can’t get away from it. You can’t allow this to just do everything for you and assume it’s going to be okay. It’s just not good enough yet, right? I do think it’s going to get better. But it can create new barriers. And that’s something we really need to be aware of.

They over-promise in advertising. Right. Which is a problem, and it’s something you need to bring up when you’re talking to people about it. Like, I know you probably read this is going to solve all your problems, but unfortunately that isn’t really the way it works. Y’know. And it does require you to look, right?

It still requires actual fixing. You have to do the work. That’s the reality. You are responsible as the website owner for your content and whether or not it is accessible. It is not your role to put that on the users. Right? So you can’t say, oh, well, if you just turned on this setting in the overlay, it would have been fine.

Right. That’s not actually fixing anything. It’s changing some of it. As the website owner, if you install an overlay, I can’t stress this enough, you need to test it. Right? It’s your website, right? You’re responsible for it, and you have control. So load it up, turn on the settings, enable all this stuff, and look to see what’s changing.

Is it changing things for the better or not? You need to know. And they’re so unpredictable that you have got to check yourself. At the end of the day, you have to do the work. But we’re all in this together.

We can do this.

Right. Things you can use to help you. We have a new free Chrome plugin. If you haven’t seen it, it’s kind of great. It’s got like a color contrast checker with a color picker and really cool ways to expose your headings and alt text and all sorts of stuff. It’s pretty great. 200 accessibility checks, including WCAG 2.2 stuff.

Color contrast, focus order, landmarks, alt text, and simulations like the screen reader simulator is back. So that’s cool. My next talk, which is going to redux again from CSUN, is Gamifying Digital Accessibility. It’s kind of fun and it is definitely happier than this one. So that’s April 24th, same time. You can sign up for that.

I need to mention, as always, that we have a YouTube channel. The more views we get on our stuff, the more justification I have for making more videos. So if you watch them and you like them, that’s great. Share them. Right? Be like, Everyone should watch this! Particularly the accessible hashtags video. That’s where this camel comes from.

Right. Moving on to Q&A.

First question. What do you mean by an overlay? Is it a browser extension that highlights accessibility issues? No. What I mean by overlay, and this was asked early, as I said, like, it’s software that you install on your website. Right. So it’s not something inside the browser. It’s not something a user is bringing to the table.

It’s something the website owner has installed and is making available to anyone who visits their website. And like I said, there’s like the three main types, right? The box, the Band-Aid and the A.I. and like, it may be one of those or it may be a combination of those. It really depends on who the provider is.

I see: Internally, who does responsibility fall to get this right? UX, dev, or everyone? Wow. That is a fantastic question. Okay. At the end of the day, the buck stops with the company. Like, it will go all the way to the top, right? If your CEO or whatever, the head of— your managing director or whatever isn’t on board with doing accessibility and isn’t on board with making sure that this is a priority, then it’s going to be really hard for anyone lower down the ranks to be able to be that rabble rouser and to make a difference, right?

There’s a good chance you will just meet friction and you’re going to like, you know, butt up against people all the time. I know, I’m the rabble rouser. I do get it. Like, you know, I can kick up a fuss, right? But I am really fortunate in that I work for an accessibility company. So when I go, hey, that’s…

We should do that differently. Like, they’re prepared to talk about it, right? Instead of just being like, you know, who are you and why are you bothering us? Like, you know, don’t want to change that color. You know what I mean? But as far as whose responsibility, I think it’s a tough one. Like, do you have someone who’s an accessibility person?

Right? Like, maybe you don’t like, maybe all you have are people who care, right? They care. And they’ve got just a smattering of understanding of like, how you can test some things. Right? The problem is that, like, they can agitate and maybe they can do some testing. I mean, we do webinars on how to do the basics of like manual audits and stuff so that you can do it yourself.

It’s possible that, like, you could do some of it yourself and then try to press it upward. But I think the problem is that, like, you know, when it comes to responsibility, I want to say it’s everyone, right? Like we’re all responsible, but like, that’s not really how it works. When the rubber meets the road, you know, like it’s going to be the highest person at the company who gets to make the decisions and set the direction.

Right. But there’s no reason that you, as someone who’s even, like five steps down the chain, can’t be advocating, right, and trying and trying to get people to care and to be aware. Right. Part of the reason I wanted to talk about that post from LinkedIn is that it’s just a sign of people who do care, right?

They just don’t understand enough to be able to know that they’re actually promoting one of the most inaccessible websites I’ve ever seen. You know, like, it’s almost funny, but not really. So, yeah. I think the thing is, if you look at the question of like UX, dev, everyone, is that everyone plays a role like dev will have things that they can do or are aware of that’s different from like UX or the marketing team.

Right? Like everyone can contribute in their own way. Next up: What if you know it’s wrong, but misinformed senior managers insist on it because they wrongly think it helps? That was the whole point of today. Because if you’re here, you probably know that something’s wrong, right? And having that conversation, like I said, is really difficult. You have to go to your superiors and tell them this thing you think you love that solves all your problems, doesn’t actually do that.

Like I said, no one wants to hear that. You know, like you have to do real work. You can’t just, like, forward it off to this piece of software. Yeah, no one wants to hear that if they think that they’ve got the answer. Right? The best thing I can think to say to you is like, we’ll go back in the recordings to like the talking points, because depending on which one you’re using, those talking points should get you the basics of what you need to express to them.

Right? Take a look at your own site and be like, this is what it’s doing, right? Make a loom, make a little video or whatever. And I think part of it comes down to like knowing which type they’re using and talking to them about it specifically. Right. You may not be able to change their mind, you know, but knowing that you tried for me is like one of the most important things, right?

Because, you know, if you can find the right people on the way up the list, you know, you may actually get there in the end, you know? And if you don’t, then at the end of the day, it’s someone more senior than you, and you tried, you know, and that, I think is important. Right. Something to add to your collection of headlines from the Financial Times three days ago.

“Blind internet users struggle with error-prone A.I. aids. Unreliable software installed to comply with rules to help disabled people navigate online has prompted thousands of lawsuits”. Yeah. That’s one of the more dangerous topics. Whether or not you are in a situation where— A lot of the companies that are being sued have one of these overlays on their website.

Right, I’m just going to risk it. Here’s the thing. It acts as a bit of a lightning rod. If I was going to think about who I was going to target, you know, I would probably look for anyone who was using a couple of them because it’s a signifier. Whether it’s good or bad, right? It’s a signifier that there are problems on the website.

Otherwise you wouldn’t have the overlay, right? So, my biggest concern with that is, it is a signal that draws attention. Right? And this is the thing, like, for the lady on LinkedIn, right? This was like a massive “Look how much they care about accessibility”. For some of the people who generate lawsuits, that instead would be a message of, Hey, come look at my website, because I don’t know enough to know there’s a problem.

One could argue that these sites were going to be sued anyway, and they just happened to have an overlay, and the overlay didn’t protect them. But I guess that, in a way, is its own discussion point, right? Like, if you think this is going to stop you from getting sued without having to actually make the site accessible, you’re wrong.

You know, those are the kind of questions we end up having to ask. But it’s… oof. That is where things get like, hinky, because that’s how you get sued. But yes, like, if I say this doesn’t work, or, if you use this you will get sued… That was literally one of the blog post titles that got Adrian Roselli sued, was If you use this, you will get sued. Because that’s what he was seeing happen. And I can understand why the company did not like it. Y’know. But I think part of the thing here is that we need to be honest. Right. When I say the messaging and the snake oil and all that kind of stuff is my problem, it’s because it’s a lack of honesty and it’s deception, right?

And I think that what we have to do is be honest with ourselves and with each other about what is possible and what isn’t, you know, and how these can be used effectively, you know, and what they can’t actually do. Because, while the messaging has been awful, and in my experience still is, there is every chance that like, some of them will sort it out, you know what I mean?

One of the biggest overlay companies has been bought out by a very big accessibility company that does remediation and things like that. And there’s been kind of an uproar in the industry over it because there’s lots of questions about their choice. Let’s put it that way. Right? And it could be that they’re looking at it the same way I am, where it’s like, this is something that could be even better in the future.

It’s just not there yet. And we think adding it to our arsenal of things that we can do could be good. You know, in a limited way with extra testing, right? I don’t know. At the end of the day, they had a presentation they were giving at CSUN and they canceled it because they were going to talk about why they’d done it.

And that flags for me, right? Because I think part of it is that you have to be able to justify your actions. Right? Like, if you really think this is the right thing to do, like, I’ll stand here and tell you I think Band-Aids are useful, right? I really do. But overall, you know, I think overlays don’t do what they promise, you know, and that’s not really… You know what I mean?

So I think for me, if we’re not allowed to be honest because we’re afraid of being sued, right, we are in a really bad way because I believe in making the internet a better place to be. Right. I think we can make it more accessible and make it available to everyone. And I think that equity matters.

But I think if you make it so you can’t talk about it, it’s just dangerous. Oh. Update from the person asking the question: Indeed, the Financial Times article quotes the company that was bought toning down their messaging and making more future oriented claims. See that’s an interesting one. Yes. Again, trying to avoid naming names.

But that to me is good, right? It doesn’t do it right now, right? But just be honest about it and talk about what we think it can do in the future. Right. Like where we think we’re going, you know, and how we’re going to get there. Right? If we can move away from the snake oil of like, it’s going to fix everything and you’re just sorted out, and we can actually talk about what it does and what the future holds and how we can work together to make something better, then that’s a totally different thing. I hope this has been helpful.

When you leave or I close this down in a second, it’s going to ask you what you thought. So if you could fill out the survey, that was really great. Thank you, everyone, for coming. You’ve been fab, and honestly, you’ve got this, right? You know what you need to say. If you don’t reach out, we’ll help you craft a statement. Right. And, you know, talk to your boss, talk to your coworkers, you know, and see if you can make change happen.

Thank you. Everyone.