I recently sat down with UKAAF board member Jeff Mills, who has a particular focus for us on HTML, Office Documents and PDFs for us. With over 25 years’ experience in the document industry and amazing track record in making a difference in accessible documents, Jeff’s CV includes numerous landmarks like being involved in the first ever project to create accessible PDF statements for the Web. Many UKAAF members will be familiar with the important commercial work he’s doing with his company Grackledocs, the only Google Add-Ons that check and remediate output from Google Workspace to make it more accessible.
All that means it’s always worth talking to him, but we had been intrigued by a comment in an email about what sort of a future he wants UKAAF to have.
Nice to see you again, Jeff, albeit still virtually!
This is all I ever do: my whole day is on camera, so I live in this Zoom box now.
Can you remind members about you and UKAAF?
I’ve been on the board for about three or four years now, just really trying to help with my knowledge of accessible documents, and I know a little bit about Web accessibility, so I chime in there a little bit, but really Office and now Google Docs is my forte.
As I said on my email, Jeff, here’s what’s bothering me (and I’m being a bit provocative): why, in 2021, is accessibility still a problem? I’ve got my iPhone 12 here and when the guy from the mobile company came to set it up, he changed the setting so that it’s a nice and big font for my middle-aged eyes. So, we have great accessibility all around, don’t we?
With things like screen technologies, I’d tend to agree; we’ve really come along leaps and bounds there—you can zoom in, change the font sizes, and that’s all great. But the problem we have is that we live in a world where we have some things that are in fixed document form; if I send you a PDF you’re going to read on your iPhone, great, if you’re sighted at all, you can zoom into the level that you need to. But if you’re unsighted, it needs to talk to you; it needs to read that document back—and generally that’s okay as well, the screen reader will make a best effort to read that PDF to you. Where it becomes harder and harder is sometimes those PDFs are an image, so they can’t read the text at all. Other times there is text in there, but not structured in any way that even the best machine can read it effectively. Imagine taking a novel and having to read it from start to finish in one go—you are never going to do that; you need to go back to certain sections and read a certain part, or start again at a certain chapter. In the same way, if an electronic document like a PDF is sent to you without that navigational information inside, you can’t go back to a certain part of the book, you can’t go to page four, you can’t go to the second paragraph, there’s no structure to tell a blind person how to navigate it. And I don’t see that part of accessibility getting better at all. It can get really messy; if the person creating the document or the person that receives it realises it’s inaccessible, then they’ll send it off to someone else to try and make it accessible, so that’s another person editing the document and sending it back to you asking, is this what you meant? You end up in this endless Round Robin.
So, it’s an intractable problem—meaning, it can never be fixed?
The thing UKAAF pushes is remediation at the point of creation wherever possible. Everyone should make these things accessible to start with, where it shouldn’t be a lot of hard work. The important step there is taking the pain out of creating these things. Too often, even today, people walk out of great accessibility training and forget it completely or must look back on a booklet or something. What you want is a system whereby any user, at any time, has enough online help at their fingertips as they create a document so everyone can create an electronic document accessible all the time. That doesn’t cure all the ills—a bit like the same way our phones don’t cure all screen accessibility issues for mobile users, just because you can zoom into a certain text size. But it’s another link in the chain of making digital content properly and genuinely accessible to everyone.
Is it the end in sight for all this? I mean, do you think technology will get to a stage where they simply won’t be an issue—or is that naive?
I don’t think it’s naive, I think it’s a wonderful vision.
But not one you share?
No, as sadly I don’t think that the end is ever in sight. It’s a bit like expecting a computer to be able to do something like write a great screenplay any time soon; I think one day, for sure, computers will write excellent scripts, I just doubt it will happen in our lifetimes. It’s the same way with documents just being accessible, because there are so many things within a document that are contextual. I don’t think we’re ever going to get to the point where this has just gone away or been automated away completely.
Educational or technology? I’m interested in what you see as the best.
I think it’s a bit of both. It’s very easy for those of us that are within the system to think that everybody thinks about accessibility all the time, because we do—it’s in our face all the time and that’s what we do on a day-to-day basis. But realistically, we’re the 1% that really think about this stuff, and the reality is that probably won’t change because most people don’t need to think about accessibility. There’s a big education piece that needs to be done, which is continual, and which we’ve been doing for 20 years, trying to make sure everyone knows that accessibility is a thing.
By the way, Carina, you say ‘technology,’ but I now think it’s legislation that’s the missing piece of the puzzle, and that legislation needs to be stronger. In the US they’ve come a long way; lots of public services over there are insistent on accessible formats being created, which is great. But while we get taught in primary school how to use things like Word and create documents and PowerPoints, we’re never taught at 10 years old about creating documents that might go to someone that needs an accessible way into it, so the education task kind of never ends. So, in the background I suspect you’ll always need technology to assist with that step.
Fascinating. OK Jeff, let’s be a bit controversial; how do we make sure we don’t need UKAAF at all anymore?
I don’t think UKAAF’s one of those charities like Cancer Research that exists to solve cancer and wants to get shut down one day as it’s no longer needed. I don’t think we’re that. UKAAF is here to help guide the standards for accessibility, and by the logic of my argument here, I don’t think the need for that could ever go away, because we’re here to make sure those needs are being met. And as technology changes around the way we humans consume information, UKAAF or something like it should always be there to keep on top of that, and ensure that whatever process we use to do that is always accessible and can be provided in alternative formats so that people, no matter what their ability, can still consume it.
Let’s jump in a UKAAF Time Machine to close; if I were to speak to you in September 2022, a year from now, what would you like to have seen happen in terms of accessibility and what our organisation’s trying to do?
A year in what we are trying to do seems to be a very short period! But I’ll try: the biggest thing I would like to see in the next year is corporations realising that it’s not just a very small group of their employees that are producing documents for the Web that they need to try and make those accessible, because most companies try and do the right thing there. Instead, what I’d love to finally see starting to happen is corporations realise that they have tens, hundreds, thousands of people creating millions of documents all the time that should be automatically accessible to start with… and a little bit of education and a little bit of reliance on technology—and you don’t have to spend millions on these things—would make a massive difference in all that output in accessibility terms. Why not make everything every employee generates available on all formats all the time? It’s not that difficult. So that’s what I’d love to see in the next year is that we’ve made great strides with corporations realising that it’s not just a select few that need to create accessible documents.
You say ‘corporations’ there, Jeff. Aren’t banks particularly rubbish at this?[Laughs] That’s not really fair anymore; they have improved, and a lot! To be honest, financial service providers are probably one of those institutions that try the hardest, and do make corrections for a range of disabilities; if you go to the documents within their websites, they’re quite good. But when you’re talking about financial institutions, they also have quite complicated websites, so to try and make the whole of that side accessible is like fighting the tide sometimes—as soon as an innovation comes out, then it produces another accessible question to solve. They’re forever competing against another bank that comes up with a new function, but overall things overall are a little better.
Last question, Jeff—thanks, this has been great. What ultimately is your message to UKAAF members and their supporters over the next few months?
I think I’ve seen an acceleration over the last little while of interest in accessible documents, as well as greater and greater acceptance and inclusion of different sorts of ability within society in general—just look at how popular the Paralympics is now; I think people think about this stuff in a slightly different way. I think the narrative has changed a lot, and I think we’ll see that continue and accelerate over the next year. I’m really hoping it will.
Thanks for your time today, Jeff.
Interview conducted by UKAAF PR Officer and Board Member Carina Birt
