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Diane and Neil FinalSpeaker Key:DLDiane LightfootNMNeil Milliken00:00:00DLHello and welcome to the latest Business Disability Forum podcast. I’m Diane Lightfoot, chief executive, and today we’re going to be talking about technology in the run-up to the Diversity in Technology conference that takes place on 24th May in London. And so I’m delighted to be joined by Neil Milliken from our partner Atos. Hello, Neil.NMHi there.DLAnd also the founder of one of the world’s largest Twitter chats, AXSChat. For a discussion on why diversity in technology is so information. And I really can’t think of anyone better qualified to do that, so massive thanks to you, Neil, for being with us here today.Before we get going, as always we would love to hear what you, our listeners, think about our podcast. So please do get in touch with us if you have any thoughts or questions at media@.uk or you can call us on 020-7403-3020 or tweet us at DisabilitySmart. So Neil, an easy question to start with possibly. What drives your passion to champion inclusion of disabled people in the workplace?00:01:20NMWell, aside from it being the right thing to do, I am dyslexic, and so I’ve been using assistive technology since 2001. It’s been something that’s helped me achieve some of the things I wanted to do in my life. And I wanted to share that experience, which was really for me a road-to-Damascus conversion to technology, and then a second one to assistive technology with other people and help them maximise their potential.Because a lot of the time if we make the right adjustments, if we supply the right technology, we can enable people to be fantastically effective in work and have great careers. So for me, that’s why I’m passionate about it, and I’ve seen some people amongst my peer group and people that we deliver this to go on to do amazing things.DLAnd it’s topical today, sadly topical, that we’re recording this at the point where Stephen Hawking, Professor Stephen Hawking, has just died, age 76. And I think, amongst many other attributes, he is a fantastic exemplar of the transformative power of technology and assistive technology, without whom he wouldn’t have been able to do any of or many of the great things that he did.And certainly the world would’ve been denied a fantastic scientific brain, so a huge tribute to him. Most of us clearly aren’t going to achieve the likes of what Stephen Hawking achieved regardless of the right technology.00:02:53But we do see time and time again the huge difference it makes in people’s lives in being productive at work and being able to do things that their non-disabled peers take for granted. That horrible expression, levelling the playing field but really just enabling people to be the best they can be at work. Are you happy to tell us a little bit more about your journey towards technology?NMYes, sure.DLAnd how you came to, came to embrace it and…?NMYes, on the cusp of the generation that learnt about computing at school, on the wrong side of that. So we got marched into a classroom. Told this is VDU. This is a CPU. This is what they mean. Right, actually, computer education done. See you later. And it wasn’t until I’d actually graduated and was in the world of work that I really took to computing again.And it was really, for me, a revelation because I struggled with a lot of things at university and I’d found coping strategies to work around it. But I was handwriting all of my essays and so on and finding ways of tracking with rulers to read all of this, read all of the work that I needed to get through. But technology would’ve really helped.And when I discovered it in the workplace and I discovered things like spellcheckers and stuff that was formatted and looked nice, it was, it was great. And a really key thing for me, being dyslexic, was actually the discovery of Microsoft Outlook. I know it’s not an assistive technology.00:04:29But for me, it’s been probably the most helpful thing in my life because it helps organise me. So calendaring and reminders in somewhere that is searchable, because I need to be able to find stuff again and I can’t remember where I’ve put it, has been truly transformational in the way that I do work and organise my life. So technology’s fantastic. I did my second degree, and I had access to assistive technology. I worked from 2001 for a company called iansyst, which is also a member of the Business Disability Forum.DLThey are [unclear] business, which is fantastic.NMAnd it was while I was there that I got diagnosed with dyslexia. It runs in the family. I’d been in denial for years and just wondered why things were hard. And as I did my master’s, I used assistive technology to help me with my master’s. So I dictated all of my master’s, including all of my exams. That was, that was great because it enabled me to express myself in a much better way.I wasn’t having to worry about spelling or the difficulty of coordinating my fingers to type. So that was, that was fantastic. It was always… Just a cautionary tale. If, you have an invigilator if you’re doing your exams with voice, and they want to check that you’re not cheating. So there’s someone sitting watching while you dictate. Pro tip is to make sure that you haven’t highlighted your answer before you turn around to the invigilator and ask how much time you’ve got left. Because it overtypes the entirety of your answer.00:06:03And then it overtypes your swearing where you taught Dragon to swear.DLBut at least the swearing will be spelt correctly.NMIt was because I taught it properly. So after a couple of minutes panic, you remember controls undo and everything else. But essentially, yes, make sure you turn your microphone off. Dragon’s been fantastically liberating for me. I still use it. It frees up a huge amount of time. It makes me more effective in how I communicate, and so I want to share that with people.Now everybody has different technology needs, so not everyone wants dictation software. We supply our customers and our colleagues with things like screen readers, magnifiers, proof-reading tools, etc., and, of course, the physical hardware and physical adjustments as well.But technology is developing really, really fast. And it’s an area that I’m hugely excited about because there’s a massive change coming in the way that we interact with computers. And a lot of that can be really helpful for people with disabilities.DLYes, definitely. I was really struck about what you said just a moment ago about Outlook not being assistive tech. Two things around that really. Firstly, I know that Hector Minto, Microsoft… I was going to say he’s evangelical, but so he should be because he’s…NMThat’s his job.00:07:18DLBeen a technical evangelist. That’s his job. He talks about the fact that assistive technology actually should be technology. It should be mainstream, and it chimes with me when thinking about productivity tools. Because actually just having a laptop or a phone or even a pen, they’re all productivity tools that help us to do our job better. So actually why should using Dragon or JAWS or whatever it is be any different?On the second thing, really you’re talking about the benefits of Dragon for you. I was talking to Nicola James at Lexxic, and she was talking about how in society too often we value accuracy over creativity. And so if tools like Dragon can help you nail the accuracy bit and actually showcase the creativity in full behind it, then that’s got to be, got to be a good thing.So clearly, Neil, you’re passionate about technology, and that comes through. Obviously, hence, asking you here today. But you set up AXSChat. So as well as job day job, you set up AXSChat which I had put down as the world’s largest Twitter chat, and you very modestly said, it’s one of the largest…NMYes.DLTwitter chats, which you run in your spare time religiously every Tuesday evening…NMYes.DLI think without fail. Rain, shine, snow, etc. So what led you to set that up?00:08:34NMWell, it can be a bit lonely in the world of accessibility in that you… Especially when you’re working in a really large organisation. So you really want to find ways of reaching out and learning from peers and finding out more information. And also, a bit like Hector, I’m quite evangelical about the topic. So I wanted to tell the world about how great accessibility is and how wonderful all of these productivity tools are.And I also felt a little bit, having been on social media for a long time, that the accessibility industry was a little bit spiky sometimes and that what we wanted to do was find a way of reaching out to business and to non-expert people to make sure that they were part of a wider community. And I’m a big believer in community because it’s together that we can really make a significant change.So I thought that social media was a great place to do this. I chose hashtag that wasn’t the technical accessibility one, and then I reached out to a lady in the States. It was well-known disability and accessibility evangelist and expert Debra Ruh, and we set up AXSChat. We’ve been running for three and a half years. We got 150-plus video interviews on our website, and we, yes, run it religiously. There is no let up. I could do with a holiday, some point.But essentially we run it every week, and anyone can get engaged. The, we structure all of the questions in a such way that the chat is a structured Q&A. There are six questions, and anyone can answer. And we deliberately make it wide to encourage people to get engaged, and it teases people out on to Twitter that aren’t necessarily extrovert.00:10:25And quite often we get novice Twitter users engaging. And this really gives us a rich conversation. And we’ve had, I think, something like 2.5 billion impressions on the hashtag since we started, which is more than I’d ever, ever anticipated. So it’s a bit like riding a tiger. Once you’re on, you really can’t get off.So we definitely want to continue doing AXSChat, we want to make sure that it’s sustainable, and we want to engage the community further and leverage what we’ve done so far to help organisations bring about change and help generally encourage a more positive and inclusive world.DLWell, I can say that I have never ridden a tiger, and I hope never to do so. But I like that as an analogy, and 2.5 billion impressions is impressive. So that’s pretty incredible. I really like the fact that you are emphasising the non-techie aspect of it, and the whole thing around technology as an enabler of people is something that I’m really passionate about.It’s also helpful to people of my generation who grew up, I suspect before you, Neil, when the only technology we had at school was the language lab which, as Eddie Izzard says, is a tape recorder and a table. That was about as good as it gets. So to think about the things that we’ve got now is quite astonishing. So this is probably difficult to answer, but what’s some of the themes that you see coming up on the chat?NMWe have a really varied range of guests. So we’ve had guests that are technical.00:11:57So we’ve had people like the guys from the Barclays accessibility team, Paul, coming on talking this week. We’ve also had Heydon Pickering, who wrote Inclusive Design Patterns, from The Paciello Group. So we do do some technical stuff, but we’ve also had people talking about the softer side of things.So we had Fleur Bothwick from EY come on and talk about their inclusion initiatives. We had Stephen Fry come on and talk about mental health. That was, that was great. I couldn’t really believe it when I got a message in my…DLIt’s cool.NMDirect messages saying, yes, like to come on. Think it would be quite good thing. So that was great. We had some technical challenges that day, but we overcame it. Gosh, lots of guests. We’ve had over 150, so…DLI was going to ask who your most memorable guest was, but I guess topping Stephen Fry would be quite difficult.NMHe was memorable and for the wrong reasons too because he had an Internet outrage right in time for the chat.DLOh, dear.NMSo what we had to do was triangulate the whole thing. And his PA was trying to tweet on his behalf with 20% battery life from the director’s box at Norwich City whilst he was texting her the answers from California, where he could only get one bar of mobile signal.00:13:14DLThat sounds like a… That sounds like a challenge. Okay, so apart from AXSChat…NMYes.DLYou’re also part of our own technology taskforce, which has been running now for ten years. We’re celebrating ten years of the taskforce, can you believe it, this summer? So why is that important to you to be involved in that?NMWell, okay, I think it’s really important for me because I work for a large organisation, a large IT organisation at that. And it’s a great place for people to come and share the difficult thorny issues that they’re dealing with in an atmosphere which is friendly, is that people are open and are able to share some of the challenges that they have implementing accessibility in an enterprise environment where you can’t just throw away the old stuff and start afresh.Yes, companies have sunk millions, sometimes tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of pounds or dollars into software and systems and so on that they’re running their businesses on. And they may or may not be particularly accessible. And dealing with that and dealing with the supply chain is a challenge that is common across businesses but unique to business. And it’s something that doesn’t get talked about often enough. It’s something that we want to talk about on AXSChat, and we try and encourage organisations to be open about the challenges because we’re not perfect.00:14:35No organisation is. No one’s reached that accessibility nirvana yet. But the taskforce is a great place to talk about these things and find ways of mitigating those issues and dealing with them and coming up with solutions and sharing what we’ve done and what others have done in order to make things better. And I find it really rewarding. We use the maturity model, which we’ve had some input into, in a lot of the ways that we deal with our own internal accessibility and also when we’re working with clients.DLThe maturity model is certainly something that has really resonated, and I think we’re going to look at how we can replicate that in other areas because it’s such a good way of really identifying where you are and identifying progress and priorities. Legacy issues that you just talked about is something that we hear about a lot. So apart from the obvious, why do you think technology companies should put greater emphasis on accessibility within the product development process?NMWell, obviously, you have to start back with the legacy stuff. It’s really expensive to retrofit accessibility. I got some examples where people have failed to consider accessibility during a project and had to retrofit it. And that has cost actually over the cost of the original project.DLWhat? In entirety?NMYes, more than 100% of the original project budget was spent on remediating the accessibility issues, whereas actually if you plan for it, it’s around 2% to 3% of the overall project cost on average. Obviously, different projects have different challenges, but that’s roughly the cost if you plan for it up front. So huge difference.00:16:15DLYes, huge difference.NMAnd therefore we say, actually, if you engage with us now, it’s really not going to be that painful or not that expensive. I think also, as we’re moving into new technology projects, there’s all of these new wonderful things that we’re coming across that are enabling, innately enabling. So you got things like voice command. You got ways of authentication that are much less painful than before, and we’ve gone through a bit of a peaks and troughs with security.Security has become a really issue. It’s a massive issue for large enterprises. It’s massive for corporates and banks and so on and so forth. And what’s happened is that those companies have pushed a lot of the burden of security on to the end users. So it’s become a lot harder to use things like online banking over the last few years.For me, as a dyslexic person with not brilliant working memory, for ever locking myself out of my bank account because I was having to use two-factor authentication and getting the sequences wrong on the pin numbers.Being able to use biometrics has enabled me use banking apps again, where I was unable to and I ended up having to go back from using technology to using the phone. I think that that stuff is tremendously enabling and is something that is also going to be helping people that don’t consider themselves to be disabled.00:17:46There is a huge cohort of people out there, particularly the older generations, who… Their hearing is not as good as it was. Their mobility is not as good as it was. Maybe they’re wearing glasses and so on. But they don’t consider themselves to be disabled. They may qualify under the Equality Act, but they would never consider themselves to be disabled, and they would never go out seeking disability aids or accessibility. So just embedding this into your products right from the get-go, calling it customisation or ease of use makes a tremendous difference.DLYes, definitely. And we often say that when you get things right for disabled people, you get things right for everybody. And I think that’s very true in that example and not just for people who may be struggling with their dexterity or hearing or eyesight but just who are time-poor. All those things, actually they benefit all of us.NMAbsolutely. Yes, it takes, it takes an awful long time to go backwards and forwards with two-factor authentication, even more if you’re ringing up the help desk to reset stuff and then they send you a pin number through the post.DLYes, indeed.NMSo yes, saving a lot of time. And when it comes to business… Actually, when you’re looking at the amount of time, even seconds per transaction and not necessarily financial transactions but all of the things that you’re doing throughout day build up to huge sums of money quite quickly. So we’re 100,000-person company. If we start losing a couple of minutes per person per day, that’s amounting into millions.00:19:21DLIt matters.NMYes.DLIt really matters. Yes, it adds up literally. So that all makes complete sense. So I guess, why is it happening? What do you think is the greatest challenge facing the accessible workplace technology movement? That’s a bit of a mouthful.NMThere’s numerous challenges some of which is fragmentation in that organisations, especially large ones, operate in silos, and so it’s difficult to get the message across the whole of the organisation. I think that also sometimes the standards around accessibility are somewhat impenetrable and they’re looking… They’re designed for experts. And actually what we want is stuff that’s designed for everyone.I half-jokingly say that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a cognitive accessibility nightmare because they are really difficult to understand and all the numbering is really difficult. And people are saying, well, it’s guideline.… I can’t remember which one it is. I can understand the core principles.And so if we take stuff back to the core principles, which I think need to be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, then everyone can understand them. We, I think we quite often get wrapped up in the technicalities of this stuff and don’t do a very good job of communicating.00:20:38DLYes, I think you’re right, and then people think it’s more difficult than it is. So what advice would you offer technology providers who are interested in developing or expanding an accessibility initiative?NMSo I would say that firstly don’t hesitate. Do it. It will pay back. But that the payback is not necessarily the primary motivation. I think what you will find is that you’ll get… You should be looking at finding ways of satisfying users and finding ways to make stuff easy. So yes, try and follow accessibility standards, but the key thing is making stuff easy for people.It’s giving people options and making sure stuff is clear and that they can be successful. And that is in every business’s interest. You don’t want to have a product that people can’t use, that… If you’re selling something, you don’t want to have a shop where people can carry the stuff, but they can’t… They can go around with a trolley, but they can’t use the checkout.DLYes, I’m interested that you used the word use or usable because sometimes the words accessible and usable get used interchangeably. And they’re not the same thing, but there’s…NMNo.DLDefinitely a sweet spot in the middle, isn’t there?NMThere is.00:21:56DLWhere you can create something that is both accessible and usable and that then works for the widest possible amount of people…NMYes.DLWhich is… Logically, it’s got to be a good thing.NMYes, so there is this perception that accessibility is making stuff work with screen readers. And a lot of the early work has been about that and a lot of the standards and the technical standards relate to the interoperability with assistive tech. But there is also a huge part of it which is about making stuff obvious, making sure that people can understand how to use stuff. Which is part of those underlying principles too. Which has this massive overlap with usability. Which is essentially good product design, good marketing, just good business.DLYes, absolutely. So finally, how do you inspire the next generation and help them to understand the importance of removing barriers between organisations and technology specifically for disabled people?NMOkay, so there are few things we’re doing. Firstly, as an accessibility professional that has grown up using a language lab. So I’m older than maybe you thought.DLWell, whatever you’re on, I want some, Neil.00:23:07NMSo we’ve started an apprentice programme within our organisation. We’re on our second cohort of apprentices now. That’s been one way of growing the skill base. I’m looking to actually make a national standard for apprenticeships in accessibility so that it becomes a recognised career path for people.I think that one of the things that we need to portray is the idea of situational disability. So, and stop… And this is something that Microsoft have done well with, is with the little illustrations of how the facilities that you get through accessibility are also really useful in other situations and scenarios. Like drop kerbs being good for mums with prams or delivery drivers. Captioning being good if you happen to be in a noisy bar, etc.But also that doing accessibility enables you to knit together all of the cool technologies, so speech, haptics. Assistive technologies tend to get to play with all the cool tools first. So that’s one of the real joys of the job, is that you get to play around with new technology because you got the excuse, well, it might be useful.DLWell, that sounds pretty good. I also heard yesterday, and forgive me I don’t know the source of this stat, that in a survey 75% of millennials thought that diversity was really important. I think that was in the context of business. But if that’s also true of technology, then hopefully we’re in the right place.NMSo I would agree. I, for the last couple of years, I’ve also been our lead for diversity, broader diversity within the organisation. And diversity is really key to business survival. This is a really difficult time for businesses because there’s a such huge amount of change.00:25:00What we really… What imperils businesses most is homogeneity because that leads to group think. And in a time where there’s so much going on, so much rapid change, we need the broader spectrum of ideas possible.So employing people from different cultural backgrounds across generations with differing abilities is really key to being able to think differently, being able to innovative. And one of the things that we use to sell accessibility is the fact that it’s a driver for innovation. Because if you understand the needs of people with complex needs and complex technologies, then you’re going to find new ways of doing things.DLYou are indeed. That’s a very good point to finish off. Thank you, Neil. Inspirational as ever and brilliant in the run-up to the Diversity in Technology conference which, as I mentioned, takes place on 24th May at the Business Design Centre in London.And I’m very pleased to say that, as a speaker, I have a discount code to share with all our listeners. So if you want to book on, please quote the code speakers15, it’s quite simple, to get 15% off your ticket price.So thanks again to Neil for enjoying us today. As I mentioned at the start, please do feel free to get in touch if you’ve got any questions about what we’ve spoken about today. Any comments. Any thoughts. We would always love to hear them. You can e-mail us at media@.uk.00:26:30You can call us on 020-7403-3020 or tweet us at DisabilitySmart. So that’s it from us this time, and we look forward to speaking with you on our next podcast.00:26:57 ................
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