Here’s a good reason to join an organisation you don’t know anything about:
Realise it’s a great way to help a cause that really matters to you.
That’s one way, at least, of understanding the latest UKAAF monthly webinar, where Roger sat down to talk to fellow UKAAF Board member Jeff Mills.
Very well-known to the UK accessibility community and UKAAF members, Jeff is of course our point man for all things HTML, Office Documents, and PDF. That’s because he has over 25 years’ experience in all these issues and technologies.
He is also, of course, founder of a great little company called GrackleDocs, which does so much sterling work on making the Google Doc suite more usable for blind and partially sighted people (or as it says, allowing users to create accessible content within the Google workspace).
Enter PDFUA
In the webinar, Roger gets Jeff to tell us about how he became involved in technology for disabled people, which intriguingly seems to have started in his very early days as, of all things, an apprentice lithographic printer.
It turns out that having a foundation in so-called ‘wet print’ stood Jeff in good stead, as he was soon combining skills in ‘electronic printing’ with his interest in programming (well, he does say he’s been a geek since the start!).
Then, he says, one of the companies he was working for had a really large finance company client that came to them and said one of the directors is blind and can’t read the statements they were producing. “They were PDF statements being put online by then, so we said we’d see what we can do—and we realised that there was this thing called PDFUA, user accessible PDF, and this could solve a lot of problems.”
Exposure to this standard gave him and his team a lot of insight into the practicalities of working with large print streams and user accessible PDFs. “That’s really my move from technology and how I got into accessible technology,” he says, “directly through customers pushing us.”
Roger then gets Jeff to walk through the Grackle story–which he introduced by making us hear one! (If you weren’t aware, a ‘Grackle’ is actually a kind of blackbird most commonly found in North America.) As Jeff explains:
“Grackles flock together and they chatter in their thousands, so when we came up with a name for this thing we were trying to build, we wanted something that sounded a bit more like motion and Grackle sounds a bit like a verb—’to Grackle something’.
“I’d love to say I took credit for this, but it was our Chairman who came up with that name back five or six years ago. And as soon as he came up with the name, it was like, ‘Yes, that’s the one, so we went with it.’”
A lot of really interesting stuff about the growth of Grackle as a company, especially around why Google Docs became the initial focus of the company, which has now made over five million documents accessible globally and which now supports over 20 checks that take you through how to do tables, headings and look at your colour contrast and a multitude of other useful things.
The rise of the Google Workspace
Jeff also details how the company has evolved to help with other parts of the Google stack like Sheets and Slides. If you’ve not used it for the latter, you may be pleased to hear that if you’re like most of us and just throw text boxes on a page and move them around, with Grackle you can tell the system that this box is number one, that is number two, this is number three, which the software then properly organises for you on the page.
We also hear about the emerging links Jeff’s building with ePub, how he’s keeping an eye on the evolution of Microsoft’s Windows, but that fundamentally, “We don’t see ourselves moving outside of the Google space, as we think Google Workspace will continue to expand—it’s now in something like 80% of all education institutes in North America, and there are over six million business users around the world that are paying for Google.
“Everyone thinks that Google is this free thing that everyone uses, but there are a lot of businesses paying a lot of money into using Google Workspace and we can just see that expansion.”
The convo then switches to what Jeff sees as coming next in the wider field of assistive tech. He thinks that reader technology will take a little bit more of a jump over the next few years to assist with the documents being created, but that it’s still going to be a people-driven process that helps this forward rather than a 100% tech one.
And as we hunted, we then found out why he wanted to help out with UKAAF and what that looks like now. “I hadn’t heard of UKAAF, but then I started working with the PDF Association and the groups around that Association, and I realised that there was something out there. I didn’t realise there was something out there to help people to start thinking about these standards in a deeper way, and so it was absolutely through the creation of Grackle and just being on the circuit a little bit more, seeing what was out there, then the conversation with UKAAF: ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
“I think one of the eye-opening things back then was having been around accessible documents so often, I took so much for granted that people would inherently know. And of course, when you’re talking about the general public, that’s not true; 99% of people don’t know this stuff unless they’re told and you have to make it a little bit more obvious.”
Jeff then takes a couple of really interesting questions from the floor, including one on if providers of electronic documents are becoming more aware of material in accessible formats, and the value Grackle gets from feedback from accessible tech users all over the world.
I do recommend listening to this one, as it’s a really delightful conversation between real experts and UKAAF leaders… and you also get to hear a Grackle squawk!
