From Frustration to Delight: Real Accessibility Wins in Everyday Products

When we're constantly fighting for baseline accessibility compliance, it's easy to miss the quiet victories happening around us. In this candid conversation, returning guest Steve Tyler shares refreshingly positive experiences that demonstrate what's possible when companies truly commit to inclusive design.

Steve recounts his surprisingly delightful experience switching to EE broadband, discovering Braille labelling physically built into the router and an online contract process that automatically detected his screen reader use. Rather than the typical accessibility nightmare, the system seamlessly adapted to provide an equivalent experience. Similarly, his HP printer delivered unexpected independence through a fully accessible app that allowed him to complete tasks like checking ink levels and even creating personalized greeting cards without assistance.

These examples highlight what accessibility advocate Kevin Carey called the "peer normative equivalent" experience – being able to accomplish the same tasks, at the same time, for the same price, with comparable effort as anyone else. This stands in stark contrast to the frustrating reality that 95% of websites remain inaccessible and disability employment rates have shown minimal improvement over 60 years.

Looking toward the future, we explore how AI might transform accessibility through conversational interfaces and intelligent agents that could help navigate complex systems. However, this technology also raises important questions about privacy, trust, and the preservation of human connection. As Steve powerfully reminds us, "Put humanity back into tech development" – because the most successful innovations recognize that behind every accessibility need is a human seeking not just functional access, but an equivalent, dignified experience.

Chapters

• 0:02 Welcome Back, Steve Billish
• 1:23 The State of Accessibility
• 5:02 A Surprising Broadband Experience
• 10:30 The Sniffing Techniques Debate
• 14:10 The Delightful HP Printer Experience
• 21:30 AI Assistants and Future Possibilities
• 30:54 Putting Humanity Back in Tech

Transcript

Neil Milliken: 0:02

Hello and welcome to AXSChat. It's just me as a host today because of various issues of connectivity and gallivanting around the world, so I'm very happy to welcome back returning guest, Steve Tyler. Steve was on recently talking about some of the work that he's been doing with Leonard Cheshire and other stuff, but as part of that conversation we were having conversations afterwards about the general state of accessibility. So, um, we thought that there were probably other conversations to be had here. So, um, Steve, welcome back. It's good to have you back on the show thanks for the return visit.

Steve Tyler: 0:49

They're very pleased to be back excellent.

Neil Milliken: 0:53

So, we were talking off air about the state of accessibility and I think Debra was a little despondent about how it seems to be a retrenchment (In accessibility) and so on and so forth. And you say, well, actually there's good stuff happening too, and I think I feel that too. Some stuff is hard, some stuff goes backwards, but there's also stuff, systemic stuff, that's happening in the background that sometimes doesn't get mentioned. So you had a couple of examples of this.

Steve Tyler: 1:23

I really did and I'm very conscious. Of course we talk endlessly about the challenges because that's what you know. That's what we're here to try to fix, or at least some of us are. You know, um, and you know I can't help all the time thinking what a ludicrous situation we're in. You know 95% of homepages inaccessible. You know the employment rate in people with disabilities, the educational attainment rate are lower in people with disabilities. These latest reports no change in 60 years in the UK in attainment and employment rate. You know, truly horrific.

Steve Tyler: 2:12

And one of the ways that I've you know, neil, we've talked before about these types of challenges and one of the during my career I suppose I've realized and learned and then began to implement ways of bringing about change and the way I tended to think about it was you had to meet people wherever they were, whether you're dealing with a business or a, you know, a government entity or whoever it was. There was no real. There came a point when it was very difficult to talk about accessibility in a relatively complex area, which actually we've made even more complicated in the disability community, but relatively complex stuff around disability and how you make accessibility happen and very rapidly you get into. Well, okay, how do you define accessibility? And then, well, what about you know, accessibility for a deaf person compared to the accessibility a blind person requires, or somebody with, and before you know it, you're in this world of just complications and consultants and really quite negative stuff, and one of the things that I began to focus on was let's understand where people are, or where are the majority of businesses, and it seems to me that most people understand that, at least have an idea of what they mean when they say customers and delighting the customer. A lot of companies and entities use that phrase, um, wanting to understand their customer. So, behind the scenes, I've been working on ways of creating ways of bringing that to life. How do you put together frameworks that remove the complexity and turn the conversation into something that says you understand, you want to acquire more customers? Now let's talk about what customers mean, and that customers come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and have slightly different needs, but one of them is they want your service, they want your product.

Steve Tyler: 4:45

Anyway, I'm always, therefore, shocked and amazed when I come across a product or a service that absolutely, you know, blows me away, and this happened recently, um, and it made me really think about. I was irritated on one hand well, why can't the world be like this all the time? That was the little negative thought that happened, and at the same time I was thinking, but good on you guys. You, you really did deliver. This isn't just a minor. Someone has genuinely thought through the customer journey.

Steve Tyler: 5:29

So my example first example is switching broadband, and anybody uh, I think most of our audiences will know that I've ever been through process. If you have choices around broadband providers, there is a sort of faint feeling of dread as the day approaches. So you sign up because it's a better deal, it's cheaper, it's faster, whatever it is that's attracted you, in my case, all of those things. And then the day closes in and you think there's a promise, the promise of the world. It's all going to be fine, they're going to turn up, they're just going to lay some cabling, it's going to be lovely, and in an hour and a half you'll be back online. Now I know in many cases that's simply not the situation Absolutely.

Neil Milliken: 6:24

It's why I have a mobile router, just in case. Call me paranoid or call me sensible.

Steve Tyler: 6:31

Absolutely. Yeah, oh, paranoia definitely kind of kicks in. Anyway, the day came, engineer turned up and very quickly it was, like you know, there was a bit of a discussion. They were outside laying the cables for fiber to the premises and I knew that there was going to be. I began to think I okay, this isn't going to go as well as they told me. So I don't know, not quite sure, the ducting we're using there seems to be a bit of a blockage. Anyway, look, we'll do our best. Uh, we may have to get somebody out, though to have a look down there with a camera, but anyway, perhaps that won't be necessary. And I thought, well, okay, I'll busy myself, now that I'm entirely cut off from the world for the moment, by unpacking everything and setting it up in readiness for when I maybe get switched on. And imagine my surprise I was moving to.

Steve Tyler: 7:33

For those of you who are not in the UK, there is a very large organization here called EE, everything Everywhere, and EE came out of a whole host of things, but the mobile element of it used to be orange, known as orange, and there was still an orange France and a range of other orange entities, but anyway, it always had the kind of, I suppose, the reputation and tried to make sure it was innovative and different to everybody else. Well, I opened the boxes and my first real, genuine surprise and delight was baked into the router, into the plastic of the router, so it wasn't. Along with the print was braille Braille signage of the ports of the router. So it wasn't. Along with the print was braille Braille signage of the ports and the connectors, and the phone connectors and the USB. I thought, wow, that's okay. That really is surprising. I've never seen that before. And then it was really obvious. It was really obvious how you were supposed to put this stuff together. And the engineer came in and he said, oh, you've, the blockage has been reserved. Fine, you know, it wasn't a problem in the end. Oh, you've got it all set up. I said, yeah, did you know? It had the braille attached to the? I said, oh, I've never noticed that before. Oh, that's amazing, isn't it anyway? So he was as shocked as I was.

Steve Tyler: 9:11

And then the contract signing. So contacted e contract people. They said right, and again my heart sank thinking oh god, this is going to be one of those horrific things where and the message after you jump through security and text messages, quoting, thinking, oh God, this is going to be one of those horrific things. And the message after you jump through security and text messages, quoting numbers and stuff, said right, I'm going to send you a link now and it's kind of a shared screen session. Hope, that's OK. I said, well, I have no idea. Yeah, because this recruits you to sign the contract and the agreement. That we're right. Okay, fair enough, let's go for it.

Steve Tyler: 9:52

And again, I clicked on the link and fired up the website on my mobile phone and I got a message saying ah, looks like you're using assistive technology. Would you like to use the assistive technology kind of supported system? Yes, I would. Okay, what is it? Is it screen reading tech or is it magnification? It's screen reading tech, great, here you go then and lo and behold, the entirety of the contract and it is pages. It's's about 26, 27 pages of stuff which you've got to tick boxes, go to the next and next element.

Steve Tyler: 10:34

And I was doing all sorts of changes mobile changes, broadband and home phone changes, pretty but absolutely breezed through it. And I came away from it thinking, firstly, how brilliant. I fed back to EE, I told them how great the experience was and, by the way, it's not half bad broadband either, and I kept being delighted, delighted by the way. Uh, I don't know how it does it. I'm assured that it's something to do with very special ai systems in the background. But, um, the home phone thing landline, which we've still got, is there because both of us, my wife and I, have elderly parents, grandparents to the children, and you know we've maintained a landline for that reason. You don't get many calls other than parental ones, other than, quite often, nuisance calls, which it now announces. So the first time it happened I was really shocked. About three days in and it rang and it said nuisance call sent to voicemail. Well, thank you very much.

Neil Milliken: 11:59

So all of these things made me think. What it didn't tell you, Steve, was that was your mum.

Steve Tyler: 12:05

You can never, never. This is the thing. There is a bit of uh, you're gonna watch this stuff and it doesn't need to be too smart and, in fact, wrong but yeah, exactly, yeah, it's filtering out all of those nuisance relatives.

Neil Milliken: 12:19

Yeah, it's great technology.

Neil Milliken: 12:21

And and credit, uh, where credit is due, is due to EE for doing that stuff.

Neil Milliken: 12:26

I think that what's really interesting is that, essentially, they must have been doing some kind of browser sniffing on your device investigation, which has always been quite contentious in the sort of accessibility community. The sort of accessibility community, because a lot of service providers are wanting to do it too, as you've just experienced provide really good service to their users, but there are people within the sort of expert community are saying, well, this is an invasion of privacy. And so I think that there's always a case with assistive tech and accessibility and tech in general to a certain extent, where technology there's a balance, you give up some of your privacy and information about yourself in return for that better experience, and I think that maybe we need to be having that conversation again about what's acceptable in terms of you know what? Where do we set the line of what's acceptable in terms of gathering that information about users without prior knowledge and all the rest of it, so that we can provide a better experience? And then it's not like we're then broadcasting that information further afield.

Steve Tyler: 13:53

I agree with you, the other in our favour or stuff that I guess we interesting. I can't remember I've got the report um either delivered at zero project last year or techability, one of the two. But there was a piece of research um through a mainstream coding provider and they make a whole host of apps. Basically they are subcontractors, but they requested because they're interested in exactly this. You know how are people genuinely using iphones, android products etc. And they wanted to know and so they. You can't get personal information. They made it very light touch.

Steve Tyler: 14:43

But the key thing the coding, the built into the coding um was enabled to pick up and then report was what elements of the accessibility capabilities of your smart devices are people switching on? And that's really really interesting stuff, because the short version is those things that we classified as accessibility around 65% of users, random sample, millions, millions of I think it's about 5.5 million people that were in this cohort where they generated the report, but around 65% just over had switched on what we refer to as an accessibility thing. So clearly, you know, know you could see in the numbers, you know the more complex requirements. So you know, screen reader users or eye gaze users, much lower in terms of percentages, obviously, but in terms of know, making your product easier to see, making it darker or lighter, in contrast, making all of those things that are normally bundled into accessibility quite an amazing number. And we're able to pick that, or they were able to pick that, out through these sniffing techniques, and it's particularly interesting because it's actually really difficult to get hold of this info from anywhere.

Neil Milliken: 16:24

Well, I know because we've actually been doing something similar for the workplace. So we've actually been the work that we do within my day job. We support a lot of people with sort of basic workplace it. You know windows office, um, you know your line of business apps, and, and so we've built some tooling that enables us to look at again, anonymized data, um, look at, you know, like, what's installed on any given client estate, whether that's third-party assistive technologies, jaws, dragon, zoomtext, all of these kind of things but also looking at which of the operating system and inbuilt accessibility features have been activated. You can drill down by region, you can see whether or not people are using, you know, more than one feature, and so on, and, and so this data is really fascinating.

Steve Tyler: 17:27

Yeah and yeah, and, and the numbers are far higher than the you know four to seven percent of people that are reporting having a disability that's right, and it kind of neatly leads me on to another example, actually, which was my HP example, and these things stick out again simply because they are so unusual. But I deliberately bought an HP printer. It's a family printer. It does all sorts of things that I never normally would think of using, like producing photos and stuff. But there we are and it's got a scanner built in. It's an all-in-one Brilliant piece of kit. The nice thing from my point of view is it's controlled by an app and I really I genuinely didn't have much.

Steve Tyler: 18:18

I didn't hold out a great deal of uh, expectation around it, I mean no no, it was the devices of the devil, right, you know they are the most they are, and and of course, of course, lots of moving parts and stuff that can happen and go wrong, and jammings of paper and goodness knows what else. Imagine my surprise then. I mean, so you know one of the things effectively the entire business, once it's set up, is completely controllable. I can see and control. Yeah, I can do it for myself, I can produce stuff myself, I can control the printer myself, I know how much ink is, you know whether it needs, uh, replenishing and or renewing. Um, I can look at the status of the thing and see whether the thing is jammed or what it's reporting on screen, all of that kind of stuff. But I think the delight bit was when one of the things they offer is making cards, making your own cards, postcards, birthday cards. Anyway, I made a birthday card. They've got templates and everything. I thought, well, let's go for it. I can always, kind of, you know, get help from one of the family if life gets tough and I I lose my way. But no, I was able entirely to create, integrate a photograph, a family photograph, put a message in there and make my own card without any assistance at all, and then print it off and send it to a member of the family and that I really was again. It was one of those moments where I thought, you know, it reminds me a lot of the very first time, like you, as you've been watching and pushing and developing technologies. As we've gone through life and and career, you get very sort of obsessed and, you know, engaged with whatever you're doing and kind of forget what the real outcomes feel and look like.

Steve Tyler: 20:51

And there's a friend of mine who, neil, you might be very aware of his richard orme, but worked with very closely over the years and we did a lot of work on publishing, you know, and creating, making sure that there were e-book standards and eventually, you know, amazon and e-publishing of all kinds and Apple Books and so on. We used to set each other little tasks. So we'd be at some random place in the world or in the uk and I would say to them right, um, I would like to read complicity by ian banks, go for it. And the objective. And we would ask each other these things depending on where we were could be in an airport lounge, could be on a high street and the objective was didn't matter on it, didn't matter about the format, didn't matter about as long as I could read it. He had to provide it for me in the cheapest, most efficient, fastest way possible and it had to be, you know, um, and even if that meant, and if the only way of doing it was scanning in manually, well so be it. But ideally we wanted it to come through some kind of commercial or provider mechanism and one day, you know, we'd done a lot of the hard work these services were becoming available. And now you know, of course we wouldn't.

Steve Tyler: 22:27

You know, it's certainly the less technical stuff is very accessible and in most cases, um, but there was a book I was listening, I was lying in bed, um, I think it was, you know, maybe seven or eight, eight years ago now, uh, listening to a podcast and they were talking about this book called the disappearing spoon.

Steve Tyler: 22:53

I thought, wow, sounds interesting. I didn't really even think about it, other than I wouldn't mind reading that that this chap called sam keed is a scientist who, or, you know, popular scientist, who had written about it, written this stuff went on to I think it was ibooks, searched for it, found it, downloaded it while the podcast was still playing, and it was only after, I mean the following morning, sometime much later on in the day I thought I kind of realized what I'd done, that, like everybody else, I'd just bought a book. I listened, listened to it. I thought, wow, that sounds great. Gone was the 18-month wait for it in Braille, or the special recording for a special person that might take four or five months, or the special request, which may or may not be accepted, depending on how popular the book might be. I can have it now. Yeah, the immediacy?

Neil Milliken: 23:58

Yeah, because that's, that's one of the other things I mean. We uh we have a mutual old friend, kevin kerry, who used to talk about peer equivalent. Um, you know experience, peer normative peer normative equivalent.

Neil Milliken: 24:14

Yes, exactly and and essentially that's what's happening here. We are now starting to get the normativity in sort of commercial experiences and and that's what equality really is. It's an accessibility really is about. When it comes down to what you want in life. It's. It's not can I tab 53 times to get to something? And, yes, it's vaguely accessible and horribly usable. It's actually can I have access to a product or a service in a sort of equivalent amount of time with a similar ease of experience to some other consumer that doesn't have a disability or accessibility need?

Neil Milliken: 25:02

Now, it may be that you have a terrible experience, but that's peer normative, because they give a terrible experience to everybody Quite, I don't mind.

Steve Tyler: 25:10

I don't mind the terrible experience. If it's terrible for everybody else as well, well, so be it. I mean appalling, and hopefully we'll all look for another one, yeah, but I'd rather have the same, whatever that experience is. And you know, um, we've been trying to back to that customer thing. I suppose I, just like most of us in the disability community, want to do the same things at the same time, for the same price as everybody else, with no hassle, but delivered in a way that's successful. And more recently, you know, I've been trying to the reason for focusing on the customers.

Steve Tyler: 25:53

I've had a number of discussion recently where I've commissioned bits of work or been part of a development. One of those is a piece of work to see how far, how hard, can we push the current AI mechanisms available such that they could bring to life the following idea you go on to, you know, as a business, you own a shopping site and our AI system can say, ah, yes, I can see what that is, I know it's got a basket, it's got a payment system, it's got categories of things. Yeah, I reckon it's a shop, right, okay, I will treat it like a shop and allow you to explore it in whatever way you want, and let's take a straightforward idea that it will do a dialogue based exploration, so you can call it up. And the beauty of this, of course, is my favorite persona, mrs Biggins. Mrs Biggins is about 75, 80 years old. The very person that could benefit most from delivery of her shopping to her home without having to go out and buy it can spend all the time she wants walking down the aisles and checking out in the detail or not, and putting stuff in a basket and then and then going, and then going for it and buying her weekly shop, um, or any other shop. In this case, could we do it so that she could call it by phone, talk to it through her smart speaker and it would guide her.

Steve Tyler: 27:38

Hi, mrs miggins, you know you want to browse or search. Of course, browse, okay, I want to browse. Okay, there are 15 hours. First one's the bakery aisle. You want to go down the bakery aisle? Yes, I do, okay, well, there are 15 categories of things here. Tell me when you want to have a look in more detail. Bread Yep, I'll have a look at some bread, and those things potentially are very you know, they are game changers, the interesting thing is for me is when you're talking to people that have the power to deliver these things.

Steve Tyler: 28:17

So I say look, with the least effort, I want businesses to be able to embrace this technology. How far can we make this a reality? And the response from I won't mention them very large companies, let's put it that way is Steve, that is an amazing idea. Amazing, how did you come up with that idea? And they are mystified by how amazing this idea is, just as I am equally mystified by how it is. They didn't think of it. Yeah, it's not an amazing idea. What have you been spending your time doing with this amazing ai stuff?

Neil Milliken: 29:05

I don't know, but so I think this is helping mrs miggins. Yeah, so I think there's a few things that that are on the cusp, right. So I think that when we talk about that, the big buzzword of 2020, buzzwords agenticic, ai right are. You know, they hold out some real promise. You know, there are certainly services in the sort of Silicon Valley bubble where you're already being able to appoint an agent to go and do shopping on your behalf or call up and make a doctor's appointment and all of this kind of stuff.

Neil Milliken: 29:42

Now, Mrs Miggins could benefit from that. She could buy some meat pies from next door to um. Now, if you could, uh, you know, let's face it, navigating navigating the appointment system on your local GP's website is a pain in the behind. You could ask the agent to hold on the line and try and book an appointment. So there's all sorts of real potential for these AI assistants, but there's also a significant issue of trust and privacy and all the rest of it, because you're having to give away not just sort of data about your sort of use of assistive technology. Now You're talking about your financial data, your intimate details, knowing your most intimate likes dislikes.

Steve Tyler: 30:41

So there's enormous power, but there's also, you know, enormous responsibility on the behalf of the companies that are potentially offering these services and what's scary, neil, and this is really, for me, the big call out, not just to the disability community, to all communities, because I think we all benefit. You know, I was recently at an event where I was presenting to. It was an AI event. Actually, all the providers, all the things that you've just mentioned, were very concerning around. You know, trust and things that people have never really had to, or a lot of people have never really had to. A lot of people have never really had to think about before too much, like what their data is being used for. Whose control is it in? Blah, blah, blah. You know the complicated old area, but what was really interesting to me is many management teams will think about ai in terms of efficiency. It's efficient, makes life more efficient, and the presentation I gave was it's always a bit controversial going here because but I don't know how else to do it to keep people awake or something, so it was a genetics thing. That was the conference speciality and the point I made very rapidly or early on was guys, I'm going to give you two examples around the word efficiency and your usage of it throughout this whole conference. Usage of it throughout this whole conference. The first is, of course, we want AI to be as efficient as possible in the area that it most thrives in and can most be beneficial, for example, analyzing patterns and recognizing cancers. Obviously, we want it to be as efficient and fast and effective as possible and accurate, and we want that delivered very, very rapidly. Why? Because it frees up clinicians to find solutions and with the help of AI, they can find solutions even faster. Happy days.

Steve Tyler: 32:59

Now let's think about the other term, the other way. You've used the same word efficiency efficiency in engaging with your doctor, efficiency in getting information, and often and my point really was quite often we confuse those things where efficiency you often think of as efficiency from your perspective. In other words, well, with a good ai system, I now don't need to I don't know pick up the telephone, enable people to talk to their doctor. I can just farm them off to the web or give them information. And my point was actually this is where you begin to lose the plot.

Steve Tyler: 33:51

I mean, if you take something like health services, it's a human delivered to human, received service. It's human right. I'm not ringing my doctor or calling my doctor just for the hell of it. I'm calling them normally because I genuinely do want to talk to someone that has some knowledge, and I would like reassurance. Whatever it is I want out of it. What I don't want is for you to use your AI to fob me off. So my plea is human put humanity back into tech development to use your AI to fob me off. So my plea is put humanity back into tech development.

Neil Milliken: 34:28

I think that's where we need to go. So I think that's a great place to end, because we've slightly overrun. It's always easy to do when we have such great conversations. I'm going to actually shout out for another podcast, and that's actually one called freakonomics um, which is one of my favorite love it yeah, yeah, freakonomics radio, one of my favorite podcasts, and they recently um had a couple of episodes on nudge theory.

Neil Milliken: 35:00

but but the reverse of nudge, which is sludge, which is where they start introducing all of these frictions into processes and and they were particularly focused on the us healthcare service and insurer pays and so on, and rather than strictly reckoning what they actually do is they make it really difficult and that way they are essentially restricting access to services by making stuff difficult to understand, difficult to access, etc. So again, you know, we have to think about where we put humanity at the centre of our service design. Steve, it's been a pleasure, as always, talking to you. Look forward to continuing discussion on social media. Thanks again.

Steve Tyler: 35:48

Good to catch up.

Neil Milliken: 35:50

And thank you to our friends at Amazon and MyClearText for keeping us on air and keeping us captioned.