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Rambling Fireside with Pat

FIRESIDE CHAT – PATRICK H. LAUKE 4/11/2025

This is the first in a series, of who knows what length, conversations with some of the people of accessibility. Patrick kindly agreed to be my guinea pig.

transcript

Hello, Patrick. Welcome.

Welcome to the fireside chat, the resurrection.

Why is it the resurrection?

Because it was the dead on arrival.

I used to do the fireside chat where I’d ask people a few questions.

and get them to provide answers in the TPG chat, because there was lots of people and not all of us knew each other, especially after the corporate takeover and the constant increase in the people working there.

So anyway, it was, you know, I was attempting to bring people together instead of

instead of pull people apart, as is your want.

But anyway, we’ll move swiftly on from there.

Welcome and thank you for agreeing to appear on Fireside Chat, The Resurrection.

What seat would you like, my friend?

Which one? Which seat?

I’ll go for the stylish cardboard one, please.

I don’t know how robust that is, but you can give it a go anyway.

So the way this works, Pat, is that we have all these pictures of different people that you may or may not know, and you get to choose, I don’t know,

Behind each picture is a subject.

I did have questions, but now I’ve just got subjects so we can, elucidate more or whatever, or just wang on about whatever we want to wang on about around that subject.

And also, it just gives people an out if they feel uncomfortable about it.

So

Do you want to choose the first subject?

No, that’s right. I wanted to.

The first thing I wanted to do was say it’s like a quiz.

How many of these people can you recognise and name?

Oh, good Lord.

I’m so terrible with names anyway.

So that’s top left is Councillor Doctor David M Swallow.

I wanted to ask you something about that.

I was.

I was reading some internal documentation we had today and it mentions parish councillor or a parish council.

I thought you must have written that and he must be, it must be a sly reference to our Dave.

But anyway, so you’ve got Dave then.

We got Makoto Ueki something. I’m butchering his name. Just say Makoto. Yeah, the.

I was on the AGWG meeting today and there was a big kerfuffle because there was a second Makoto and they were just like, yeah, what he is a serious chap too.

Yeah, but I saw I saw the e-mail coming in saying I will be attending for the first time.

It’s like, yeah, it’s the anticipation.

He was saying something to the effect that he had been promised

that something, I couldn’t quite get what he was talking about, but something would be included.

I think it’s to do with internationalization, but something would be included in WCAG 2.3.

I was thinking, Well, we’re not having a WCAG 2.3.

So, somebody obviously told him we were.

Yeah, it’s like, it’s like, yeah, but if it doesn’t happen now, it will happen in 2.3.

It’s like, see now, did they say today, Oh, don’t worry, it’s going to be in WCAG 3 when it comes out?

No, they didn’t because he said that that’s not good enough.

But anyway, I mean, you can read them and it’s, yeah, sorry for those watching from home or listening from home with this.

There’s an Accessibility Guidelines Working Group meeting on a Tuesday afternoon.

Lots of people attend.

I go and attend and say very little, as is my want.

This is at W3C. This is a group. Yeah, they talked a lot today.

They were talking about conformance, the conformance models, and it ends up.

So you had, you know, people such as Gregg and

others waxing lyrical about conformance models and what it meant and what it didn’t.

It was interesting.

And there’s going to be a survey.

So, okay, so we’ve got the Swallow, we’ve got Makoto.

Well, there’s you, obviously, you recognize yourself.

I think so, yeah. I’m not that far gone yet. No, I don’t.

Do you recognize the person next to you?

I’ll give you a clue.

The name is on the tip of my tongue.

The first name starts with L. Oh, hang on, hang on, hang on.

And the second name starts with Lucy.

Greco. Exactly.

Do you recognize the person at the end there?

Oh, possibly my boss. Well, you’re my boss as well. So one of my bosses is Leonie. The boss, the boss’s boss. The boss’s boss. Yeah. And then we got we got Mr. Mr. Ubisoft Gregory. Yeah. And then.

Oh, the. Well, who’s that? Patsy Hello. Who’s the one in the middle?

This is, there’s no particular reason, but this is actually a visual icon of this person.

This was your, let’s grab some random pictures to make up the square.

Yeah. That’s Lola Odelola. Okay, great. You’ve got eight for, no, sorry. Yeah, he’s right so far. And the next person?

It’s the law office of Lainey Feingold.

And the person after that, this is the last person in the 2nd row.

Yeah, that’s HIdi Amin. Hidde. Hidde. Hidde. That’s mean.

I put his sponsorship imagery on there because he and Sara bought me dinner in Toronto.

Yeah, so to guess the name of that person is fairly easy.

It’s Mr. Rosselli. Yes, it is. And who’s next to him? Oh, what’s his name?

That’s usually what happens with me.

It’s like, we talked about him the other day.

HG, HG.

yeah. Homer Gaines. Fuck it. Who’s next? There we go. There we go. Oh, that’s, it’s your friend. It’s. Yeah.

Well, you’re the friend of everybody’s.

It’s Beganyito. It’s. I haven’t. You select. It’s Beganyito. Michael. And he will be in. the hot seat. In Tokyo (Kobe). he will be. Yes.

And I’ve asked him to get a picture of you and Mike Smith together.

Excellent.

He asked me, what do you want from Japan?

And that’s what I told him. Both of us in samurai costumes. Yeah. And next to Mike. There we go. Crystal Preston-Watson. Oh, thank you.

Because I knew her name was Crystal.

I couldn’t remember the last bit.

I actually do know most of these people, but I don’t think I’ve ever met Crystal, but she just looks badass there.

So I thought I’d include her. Oh yeah. And last but not least.

Last but not least, it’s Zoe, I think pronounced Bell the last.

How is it? I pronounced Bizhal. Yeah. Beal.

I think they corrected me once when I attempted it.

I was like, no, it’s Bell. It’s like, okay.

So yeah, Zoe popped up on, because I’m doing this article for the HTML Hell.

Whatever his name is, Matuzo, Manuel Matuzo’s HTML Advent calendar.

And Zoe did a

QA for it. Yeah. Which was helpful. So anyway, okay, so you got 60.

How the tables have turned, my friend.

Yeah.

Yes, Okay, so let’s just look.

I used to work with Dave and so did you.

I’ve never worked with Makoto, but I’ve known him for a long time because he was the person that

He contacted me very early on in the piece about the toolbar, and also he was a good friend of Mike Paciello’s, and he translated Mike’s book into Japanese.

The book I can’t remember the name of them, never actually read, but apparently it’s a classic.

He was probably it’s probably

it’s like building accessible websites or something or making the web.

I probably have it here in my shelf somewhere, but yeah.

And Lola, well, I’ve met her a few times.

I’ve been, she’s doing stuff at the moment within the TAG.

She’s in the technical architecture group at the W3C, leading the web to its full potential.

So they say.

Lainey, I met Lainey, met Hidi, I’m working co-editing with co-editing the WCAG-EM with Hidde.

Adrian will, everybody knows Adrian, but people, most people don’t want to know him.

It’s interesting.

I met Homer for the first time in recently at a11yTO.

We know Beganyito, we were both there at TPAC.

Was it last year or the year before?

I can’t remember. That was last year. Last year was LA. Yeah. Was it? He wasn’t there last year. Yeah, before was Seville. Yeah. Yes, that’s where he was.

He was going around with his white jeans everywhere.

Yeah. that’s it. So we both met him.

As I said, I’ve never met Crystal Watson, Scott.

Preston Watson. I’m fairly sure anyway. Yeah. And Zoe, we used to work with. Yeah, and back in the old days. Same, same as Billy and Mike.

Billy is with Mike, you saw it with Adrian.

We used to work with, well, I used to work with Beganyito.

Yeah, I think I might have just. I used to work with Henny.

That’s not Henny, but yeah. That we collectively worked with.

So let’s get on, moving swiftly on.

Swiftly half an hour later. Anyway.

It’s the first, it’s the first one.

Give me a chance.

Okay, so you’ve got all these people, all right?

Yes.

We’ve ascertained that you know everybody’s name, or at least part of their name.

So, and as I said, under each one is a, sorry, under each one is a subject.

So which I’ll throw a question out actually based on the subject.

So choose away and we can do as many of these as you can put up with or I can put up with.

So.

Right. So celebrity squares here. I’ll go for. I’ll go for Makoto-san. Let’s see what. Makoto. OK. What’s under Makoto? Disability.

We both work in accessibility and have for some may say far too long.

Yes.

But do you yourself consider yourself disabled?

And if so, what is your disability?

I mean, how do you approach it?

How do you approach the subject and concept of disability?

Yeah. So, basically, what’s wrong with me?

These are not, I mean, not more than the not more than the usual late middle-aged person.

So, my eyesight has always been a little bit rubbish.

Yeah.

So, you know, it’s not to the not to a kind of

pathological points, but I’ve got fairly strong prescription.

And now with age, it’s not just being short sighted, but also not being able to focus up close.

So basically, my range of vision is now slowly turning into like a one sliver of I can just about read at this distance, anything closer or further away starts becoming a bit difficult.

But beyond that, I’m

I don’t think I’ve got anything that would class as a disability as such.

But yeah.

For some reason, have you got your hand up or is it just me?

It’s you, it’s your hand. Yeah, I don’t know why.

I just noticed it there because I was, I don’t know if you can notice, but in the background of the background of my background is the swallow’s arms.

That’s the. Yes. I mean, it’s this.

It’s what I see as is the mark of quality.

Yeah, the mark of the devil. Yeah, and or either.

So as far as disability is concerned, I mean, what do you think about the concept of lived experience and how some people who, you know, accessibility professionals appear to lean into having a disability themselves?

in order to, I suppose, give themselves credibility.

Yeah, I was going to say, like, give credence to their opinion.

I mean, of course, there is an aspect of, on the extreme, there will be people who haven’t experienced a particular, you know, disability themselves.

and they may or may not be talking out of their ear when they start kind of second-guessing what happens, or it would be, these types of users will be best served doing this, or think of the poor screen reader user who’s going to come across your page.

Sometimes there’s a little bit of

you know, of rubbish advice given, you know, possibly with the best intentions, but there is a danger of if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you know, there’s, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of danger.

Yeah.

So, I mean, if, if I want to get a better understanding of, of a particular disability issue was, you know, some sort of barrier.

that a person may have due to their disability, I’ll just ask.

Yeah, that’s always good.

that was actually the title of Sean Lawton Henry’s book, Just Ask.

That I made the web version for that.

eons ago.

But that was basically, basically, but that’s the too long didn’t read of the entire book.

It’s like, if you don’t know it, just ask.

And yeah, there’s certainly, there’s value in actually asking for, or double checking with somebody who’s got that particular, disability.

If you, before you start saying,

or, for a screen reader user, this is good or this is bad, maybe just double check with somebody who is actually a screen reader user.

Yeah, I would say that

the opposite side, the danger is that I often see that somebody, say a developer says, oh, I’ve done this.

Oh, I’ve checked it with my one mate who’s a screen reader user or my one friend who’s colorblind and they said it’s fine.

It’s like,

There is, as with anything else, screen reader users or, users that are uppercase or lowercase deaf and rely on sign language or whatever, there will be, there will be personal preferences, they’re not all, not every

disability is a unifying blob of they all have the same kind of idea of, yeah, this is a good way of approaching it, or this is bad.

I always equate this to, you know, you can’t just ask a single person, like a sighted person that hasn’t got color deficiency vision problems.

and say, what’s your favorite color?

Blue.

And from that, extrapolate that every person who’s sighted likes the color blue.

There will be personal preferences.

So that kind of tying it back to the lived experience.

Yes, lived experience is important, but it’s not an absolute.

Just because one person says, I have this disability, and in my opinion, this is OK or this isn’t OK,

That’s one data point.

It doesn’t mean now that from that you can extrapolate and say, right, well, all blind users or all deaf users or whatever, all keyboard users will want to do it this way rather than the other.

So, you know, it’s about weighing different opinions.

It’s obviously the opinion of, say, if we’re talking screen readers, the opinion of a screen reader user counts more when we’re talking about something specifically about screen reader usage, then I don’t know.

a random consultant who claims to be an expert in screen readers, but isn’t actually a real life user themselves of screen readers.

So, yeah, an actual user counts more, you know, it’s more weighted, but it’s not the be all and end all.

Whatever they say is more authoritative, but it’s still not the, you know…

Yeah, I have to have a sort of perspective that…

And they might even, you see it sometimes different, say, screen reader users will disagree on, oh, I like this approach, I don’t like this approach, which, it’s natural.

We’re all we’re all human.

We’re all got our own likes and dislikes.

So yeah, so the bottom line is ask people, but don’t rely upon individuals at the same time.

Yeah, exactly.

All right, I think we’ve beaten that to death for this.

No, we haven’t beat it to death, but I mean, I think we should move on now.

It’s time to choose another person.

Time to choose. I will go for Lainey. Lainey.

I can’t even remember what I’ve written.

There you go.

I mean, it’s a subject that is affecting the what we how we work and what we do, and to varying degrees, and it’s quite a polarizing topic, much like the MAGA movement is a polarizing, political movement.

AI. Well, actually, AI, I think, is

has a lot to do with the whole authoritarian outlook of politics at the moment as well.

I mean, it goes hand in hand.

I mean, it’s not the cause, but it doesn’t help.

What are your feelings about AI, I can’t even say it, AI, artificial intelligence, large language models, et cetera, and accessibility?

first of all.

I think the one problem with the whole discourse is that, the term AI is kind of so broad that it’s kind of meaningless.

there’s a lot of things that fall under AI.

there’s some good applications with things like, neural networks where

Let’s take an example.

We’re both, as you can clearly see from this picture, we’re both quite happy to tinker with images in like photo editing software.

And, you know, one of the simple examples where it’s a good thing, AI, is when you’re trying to do like clean selection masks of things.

You know, back in the old days, you’re there

trying and failing to kind of, really cut out something nicely so you don’t get like a horrible border.

Nowadays, most of the, graphical editing software, they have some kind of AI or, smart kind of selection tool that was probably trained on some neural network models.

And you can basically just let the machine

do a selection for you.

get that even in video editing, you can actually do it with moving pictures, say, I just want to isolate this particular object or this particular person, or even just the person’s head.

And, you know, it will track it, will mask it in a way that, you know, it’s so much cleaner than doing it all by hand.

So there are good uses of AI.

I think the one part of AI that is getting all the headlines in recent months, years, and that is problematic is the LLMs.

It’s the large language models where basically

all the all the knowledge that’s on the web in books or whatever has just been kind of crammed into into this predictive model.

It’s it’s kind of a giant black box.

And now, when you talk, basically, when when you prompt it, will try to

based on all these kind of statistical analysis, what’s the most likely next word that comes after this thing in most stuff that it’s been trained on, it will try to spit something out as a response to a prompt that is, you know, it sounds or it looks like something similar to what it’s been trained on.

But, you know, a lot of people don’t understand that that’s

in simple terms. That’s all it is.

It doesn’t it doesn’t know what it’s actually doing.

I mean, this is a this is a classic kind of problem of artificial intelligence is like the oh, what’s it called the Chinese room paradox where you have if you imagine you have a person stuck in a room, they’ve got all the dictionaries in the world to translate from, you know, individual words from

say English into Chinese, and you pass them a note through a little slit.

And then they don’t know Chinese, but they use all these reference books around them.

They copy what they find.

They pass out the translated slip back through the door.

And lo and behold, you know, the Chinese room, this black box has now translated

Chinese to English.

Does the actual person inside the room know Chinese?

No, they just basically use all their reference materials.

And they sat there long enough and they might, they might start it.

But that I mean, that’s the idea.

The LLMs have no concept of what they’re actually doing.

So when people talk, is that what you’re saying?

not even awareness.

They don’t even know what they’re doing.

They just know that based on this stimulus, which is the input, the most likely positive output that I can do is something like this.

So when people start assigning, like, you know, oh, yeah, it made things up or I then asked it and then it admitted that it lied or something.

It doesn’t even know what the concepts are that you’re talking about.

It’s basically when you when you then scold your AI model for not, you know, for making things up, it will just then spit out a response that looks like the most likely good response to something that, you know, to somebody saying you’ve fucked up is an apology sounding type thing.

And it will spit out. It’s not that annoying.

It’s annoyingly obsequious at times, yeah, and yeah, I mean, but that’s so, that’s the that’s the problematic kind of stuff, or it’s problematic when people…

think it does more than what it actually does.

I mean, there are interesting uses.

And when we talk about the accessibility angle, things like based on an image, it can recognize certain shapes because it’s been kind of trained on them.

And then for the, it can generate a text alternative.

But again, this is because it’s been trained enough times with pictures

of a chair to then work out that a positive response, you know, a good response to getting this stimulus, this visual stimulus of the what looks like a chair is to say it’s a chair, you know, whether it’s really a chair or not.

Yeah. Yeah. So so it’s that kind of thing.

But yeah, I mean, I find it useful for generating

the start, the starting point for complex images, because it often picks stuff up that I hadn’t seen or wouldn’t quite know how to describe.

But then, but there’s always errors I find.

And so like anything, it’s a first draft and then you can work from there.

Absolutely.

But certainly it’s, you know, the difference between

The author has not provided a text alternative, and it sucks to be you if you don’t know what that image is, if you can’t see it.

And the author hasn’t provided an image, but we ran some AI image recognition over this, and it attempted to give a text alternative.

You know, the difference is obviously night and day, you know.

So for, say, a completely blind user who can’t actually, you know, see the image,

even if it’s not perfect, even if it’s maybe hallucinating every now and again, having at least, the start of an auto-generated text alternative is better than nothing.

Obviously, if it’s handcrafted, that will always be better.

Well, not always.

If the person crafting it by hand knows what they’re doing, it will be better.

But, you know, AI can’t work out

what the actual purpose of an image is.

it can give a very straight-faced interpretation of, well, this is what you see in the image, but it can’t add what perhaps, you know, what the author actually intended to do with that image and what the meaning is behind it.

Because, you know, again, AI doesn’t actually reason, you know, LLMs or whatever.

They don’t know what a page is or whatever.

All right. So cut to the chase.

AI for accessibility testing.

For testing.

I mean, the one part, you know, where AI is being used for testing, or at least they’re trying to use it for testing, is in all those areas where currently when you’re doing a, say, a WCAG assessment,

a large percentage of that is not something that’s cut and dried.

You can’t just look at code and say, yes, this passes or it fails.

It needs human understanding and kind of interpretation.

And often it’s very contextual.

And the hope is that with AI, it can

semi-automate those kind of checks and at least kind of provide an initial best guess of, running.

I haven’t seen anything, No, nothing does that.

And I know that some accessibility companies, you know, tool.

They’ll claim it. Yeah.

you always, you’ve got to buy it before you can use it type thing and that, or you’ve got to sit through hours and then, try to market, hard market things at you.

So yeah, it’s, there’s an opacity about the AI, the utility of AI in accessibility testing as much as there is the opacity about the AIs themselves and the LLMs.

They’re black boxes and a lot of,

Sensors.

Actually, Hiddr’s written a number of interesting posts, articles about AI, and it’s well worth reading his stuff.

I have actually, not, I did read one of these, but I haven’t read all of them, but I, you know, I applaud the fact that he’s

thinking seriously about this space. And I’m interested in it too.

And because I have used a large language models, ChatGPT in particular, to help me to do things that I can’t do, which is sometimes, you know, it’s even

You’re chewing or breathing even. Your day job. Yeah. Something as basic as that.

No, I mean, with programming tasks, but I still find it extremely frustrating.

There’s this claim that you can just ask something and it’ll spit out, you know, a complete programme.

It’s just bullshit.

Oh yeah, well, we know that because, you know, we used, you prototyped something that worked, but then when we tried to

Make it do something more. I basically ended up.

rewriting it from scratch because it was quicker to try, to know what I’m actually trying to get to as an outcome rather than keep prodding the prompt machine and say, oh, now do this instead, because it always comes came back with like slightly different, slightly

and never quite right kind of fragments of code.

And again, because it, because, because it’s, it doesn’t actually understand what it’s trying to do.

It’s just spitting out, when somebody types in this, there’s hundreds of articles that use this code fragment.

So this must be related to this. So let me just spit that in.

You know, half the time when you, when you ask for a program from one of those code assistants,

it’s very likely that it’s not going to run or compile or whatever.

And then, and then you’re stuck.

Then you’re like, you know, if I don’t know, people always say, oh yeah, I use it, but then I have to go in and make sure that it does the right thing.

It’s like, so you’re doing the work twice.

You get, you know, you think you’re saving time, but then in the end you’re actually spending more time QA-ing this automated result.

Yeah. It’s yeah, exactly. I mean, I don’t I.

I haven’t found it useful to help my writing, but I have a very idiosyncratic style anyway, so I wouldn’t expect to be able to be helpful in that.

I’ve haven’t actually tried to get it to write large screeds of text.

What I did do was try to get it to create the templates for the HTML support, just the, you know,

replicate the templates and but it just adds BS in there.

And so you’ve got to take the time to, is this actually correct?

No, it’s not change it.

And so you end up, yeah, it end up being if you, if you just for things that I can do, you know, that I have the ability to do that I can do them

in a similar amount of time or less time and definitely less frustration than if I used a LLM.

But anyway, moving swiftly on.

I’m going to I’m going to go for my own beautiful face.

What hides behind me? Yeah.

Yes. Okay. That’s you, isn’t it? Yes.

Woke. Yes. Yeah.

So on the subject, I mean, it’s, what do you think about the term and does it have meaning?

And yeah, just…

I think that the way it’s being used these days, particularly in a pejorative sense, is a really good canary in the coal mine.

Freaking out, sorry. Yeah, that’s all right.

I’ll let you play with your thing.

But yeah, anybody who uses woke as a pejorative these days, that’s an immediate signal that they’re unserious and biased people, you know, because it’s being used

almost to the point of meaninglessness for basically anything that I don’t like.

Often, mostly used by people that are from the right side of the political spectrum to basically mean anything that is slightly to the left of their current position.

Yeah, it’s the same same way that it used to be, Oh, you’re a communist, or whatever.

they are, yeah.

Isn’t Trump saying that, you know…

What’s his name?

Yeah, the majority candidate for New York.

Yeah. Is it Mamdani? Whatever.

Yeah. He’s saying like, yeah, he’s worse than a, he’s worse than a socialist.

He’s a communist. It’s like, yeah, whatever.

Yeah, it’s the Red Scare and everything else, but it’s the usual, it’s the usual meaningless word now these days.

I mean, back the original meaning or how it was used was, to a specific community, usually,

underrepresented community and about being, being aware, being awake to the, systemic challenges that are always around you and everything else.

But nowadays, the way it’s being used is just as a, right wing slur.

So on the scale of very woke to asleep, where would where do you put yourself?

I mean, I was going to say like most people in our industry, but I’ve actually come across quite a few very right-wing arseholes in recent months in the accessibility community as well, which is always interesting when you find people that work in an industry.

history that on its face is actually trying to do quite positive things.

And then they start ranting about, yeah, about all these Mexicans or, whatever.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a few people, all the very Gammony, Brexity kind of types that you see in the UK, in that once you start scratching below the surface, it’s like it’s the usual.

You’re not talking about Doctor Swallow now, are you?

No, absolutely not.

No, there’s, but there are, there are certain people that we both kind of bump into every now and again that are of that ilk.

But I would say, personally, I’m fairly left in the political spectrum, if that even has a meaning anymore these days, as the Overton window has been pushed so far to the right that even Labour is in the UK is now indistinguishing from the Tories.

Yeah, exactly.

yeah, I believe in socialism, if I believe in anything at all.

universal health care, universal free education, blah, blah, blah.

I believe in paying people a decent wage, et cetera, et cetera.

And I believe in, you know, truth in politics, which is of a very, in very short supply.

When I originally put this subject woke, I was thinking in terms of how much

this this movement towards, you know, and like, like anti DEI stuff.

So how that has affected affected you personally and how do you see it just affecting the climate of of discussion and, you know, the enthusiasm to make things

usable by people with disabilities.

Yeah, I think, I mean, we’ve all been kind of very aware of, the change in the political climate, particularly in the US, but not only there, also in the UK, reform trying to ape the similar talking points.

And, the same thing happening in European countries, in Germany, Italy.

There is this kind of concerted push from the right to basically, yeah, push back on what they feel is, the woke kind of agenda that was too prevalent.

So it’s always like ebbs and flows, but particularly from our point of view, you know, we work in an industry that pretty much is, you know, one of the core pillars of DEI.

in many ways.

And the fact that, a lot of our customers are working from, are operating from the US and there is this concerted almost like witch hunt now that that’s been that’s been authorized way from up high from the president down about anything to do with that.

sounds a bit like disability or inclusion is, you know, should be defunded.

That will certainly have a chilling effect on a lot of things.

And we’ve seen this, luckily we’ve not been, when I say we, I mean, in our company directly, I don’t think we’ve felt it

immediately, but there are certainly some customers, US customers, where you start to get the feeling that maybe their budget for accessibility remediation or before training or whatever has been scaled back and where things are still happening, it’s a little bit more almost like under the radar.

They don’t want to make big waves about it.

Whereas a few years ago, it was maybe fashionable for big companies to kind of flaunt how accessible or, what their efforts are.

And, the same way that you saw the, movies and media and everything else, maybe

overemphasise some of these aspects a bit more, sometimes in a very performative way, rather than in a meaningful way.

the same way that you used to see every year, big corporations all of a sudden have their little rainbow flag when it’s Pride Month or whatever.

before, the rest of the year, they still go off and, kill people in third world countries or whatever, directly or indirectly.

So there used to be a lot of that performative kind of stuff.

But even with the companies that were doing the actual work, there certainly has been kind of a slight, taking a step back, maybe doing it a little more under the radar rather than

Openly shouting about things, and that is one of the…

I think the saddest kind of outcomes of all of this, because, if you asked me a few years back, it really felt like there was momentum with, yes, finally, big companies are getting it and they’re investing and they’re doing, but basically now.

It’s all very fragile as it all just falls away very quickly.

And I was reading something recently sort of saying that there was being anti-DEI

DEI sort of backlash or measures or watering down in UK companies as well.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I mean, they’re trying and France as well.

I think they then send their kind of the US ambassador saying you’re not going to get the big contracts overseas.

Yeah, I mean, it’s the.

It’s a really, I mean, the transactional nature of control and authority that’s been blowing with the…

Well, I think it’s always been there.

It’s just that for the most part, we’ve all been roughly aligned.

Now it’s kind of now the scenes are showing where, you know, yes, you know, individual countries can push back, but only up to a certain point, which is why, you know, you get all the politicians that a few years ago where

where slagging off Trump saying, oh, what a terrible, you know, aren’t we glad that he’s not president anymore?

What a joke he was.

And now they were the first ones to phone him up and congratulate him.

And, you know, same that you see now with all the, you know, with Tim Apple giving him his crystal participation trophy saying, yes,

We’re going to pay for the Epstein Ballroom for you and sucking up to him, but it’s there is that.

It’s just disgusting.

It is, it is.

But that’s the, I think the problem is that’s the way the world has always been.

It’s just that so far we’ve kind of not been aware of it because we were all kind of moving in.

We thought it was a reasonable direction.

You know, we grew up in a fairly liberal

a left-leaning age.

And I think, yeah, it’s just correcting itself and going back to the fucked words.

Putting that other depressing topic aside.

Let’s talk about death.

Let’s end the fireside chat with something positive.

Tell us a bit about where you’re going and to participate in TPAC and what that means to you and what work you’re doing and et cetera.

Tell us a bit about your standards work, Patrick.

Yes, tell about my standards.

I’ll tell you about my very low standards.

I mean, I’ve I always say that I’m kind of marginally involved with standards work, but I know somebody pointed out the other day that they read my official bio where it’s like occasional

WCAG contributor.

And they said, if you’re occasional, then I don’t know what a serious contributor would be like.

Because I like to, if you go on the WCAG repository on GitHub, you’ll see that out of the 500 odd issues that have been filed and pull requests that have been pulled, put there, a good chunk of them are from yours truly.

Yeah.

That’s the weird thing.

I was thinking back at that a few days ago, actually, that in my previous, previous, previous job when I was still working at a university as web editor or like, glorified webmaster, I still remember that was just on the eve of WCAG, the first version of WCAG 2 coming out, and it was still the review period.

And I still vividly remember one evening kind of we’re out at the pub after work and I had like a big printed out version of the whole thing with lots of little scribbles of mine that I was still filing through the, review periods, give us your feedback kind of thing.

There’s probably feedback because it’s usually, yeah, you get some, oh yeah, thank you very much, now fuck it.

Exactly.

I mean, that’s the thing at the time.

And I’m sure that a lot of things that are noted there are probably still in WCAG 2.2 and not been addressed.

So, you know, from a from a very from a very early age, I’ve been I’ve been kind of interested in the WCAG stuff and, you know, the now, you know, time permitting, which luckily with my job, I do get some protected time to actually look at it.

I get more involved with it.

I’m particularly keen on still working on WCAG 2.2 at this point.

A lot of people saying, why are you doing that?

We’re going to have WCAG 3. soon.

I would question the soon part, but even if that’s the case, even if WCAG 3 is just about to be released in a year or two, the reality is that, day in, day out, we’re still working with WCAG 2, for better or worse.

And we will be for the foreseeable.

And I’m just trying to make it a little bit better.

There’s a lot of parts.

And you’re doing a sterling job, you and

Bruce Bailey and Michael Gower and the whole crew.

Yeah, no, so we’re actually, we’re finally in this little subgroup that we’re looking at, the WCAG 2 backlog team.

We’re actually finally looking at a lot of the technical debts that’s been accumulated because

People have been filing issues against work on two where, the wording isn’t quite clear or things just outright didn’t make sense.

And for the longest time, that’s just been sitting there.

So we’re now, I mean, it’s a Sisyphean task because every time we think we’ve done a good job of clearing some aspect of this backlog,

In the meantime, lots more came in.

But, we persevere.

We try to push this big boulder up there, up the hill.

And, every now and again, we managed to merge in some things that I’ve been fighting for a long time.

Like recently, there was a, there’s always been auditors that would immediately fail a page if there was a non-interactive element that received focus.

They would immediately say, no, that fails.

There’s now a little bit more nuance in the understanding document.

Yeah.

Tell me, you probably know, Scott O’Hara was working on the reflow understanding doc and he did a lot of work with that.

Yeah.

Did it actually ever get pushed to, you know, I believe, I believe so.

It should be in the, I mean, that’s the thing.

There’s

There’s the published solid stable version of WCAG 2.2, which I think it was the last published version was December last year.

I don’t want to lie.

But there is an editor’s draft that is the most up to date.

And then at some point when the stars align, that editor’s draft gets republished.

But it doesn’t, you know, basically.

There’s editors drafts the non-normative docs as well because I’m because I my understanding was the reflow stuff was just the techniques or understanding docs.

Yeah, for the most part, we tinker on that.

There’s occasionally there’s a few things that actually change in the normative, but it’s mainly errata.

It’s mainly like this word has always been wrong and, you know, here’s the correction for that particular thing.

But the one thing that we can’t do in the group is basically completely rewrite success criteria.

And that’s been, you mentioned Scott’s work on reflow.

I mean, that’s been part of the problem.

Reflow, as it was written at the time, has lots of problems.

You know, it was a well-meaning kind of SC, but the way it’s been worded makes it

mostly pointless in many cases, and it immediately doesn’t apply or makes it impossible to apply as written to things like mobile applications.

And I know that, you know, WCAG was never intended to be applied directly, but it’s being used.

And yeah, the way that normative wording is for, say, reflow just immediately made it impractical or non-workable for mobile.

So, you know, with

What Scott has done with help from all of us in the group is try to add a bit more pragmatic nuance to how to interpret it in certain situations, but it was always the problem is we’re always bound by the normative wording.

Exactly.

So, we’ve been polishing, we’ve been polishing that turd as much as we could.

Yeah. Well, that’s why, that’s why we need WCAG 3, my friend.

Yeah.

Now, I mean, obviously, that I was trying to move you towards, you know, what are you going to be doing in TPAC?

So, you’re going to be involved in the back?

Is there are there backlog AG meetings or AG?

Yeah. in general.

Yeah, I mean the backlog group is only is a sub task force effectively from the accessibility working group.

So there will be meetings both of the AGWAG itself, like the large meetings.

I attended those.

I managed last time I managed to sit through half a day.

I don’t know. My mind just wanders off.

I know, they’re an acquired taste.

I remember my very first meeting from Agwag.

There’s a lot of talking and often it seems that after three hours of talking, you’re still not quite sure what the outcome of it was.

But you know, there will be a lot of…

regression. I know. So there will be a lot of that.

The actual backlog task force itself, I think we have one or two slots where we’re going to do some intense backlogging.

Hopefully just, you know, looking at some quick wins and

discussing them and just basically approving pull requests that are non-controversial, things where they just added a little bit of extra wording that doesn’t look problematic.

Let’s just merge it and not go through like lengthy periods of review.

Yeah, back and forth, back and forth.

And then just as a palate cleanser, I mean, the other bit of work that I do is I’m chair and co-editor of the Pointer Events Working Group.

which is probably an oddity because it’s not really directly related to accessibility, but as a prevalent input mechanism, there’s always some kind of aspect where at least you need to be aware that, or is this going to cause problems for, say, non-pointer users, like keyboard users, et cetera.

Sounds like you’re trying to justify it.

APA APA is a very generalized for other things.

we’re very specific.

I’m a member of the APA group and I quite enjoy it.

I mean, because when I first started getting involved with W3C in the say 2007 from then on, I used to spend a lot of time talking with Janina.

And Janina’s still there. She’s Yeah, she’s ageless.

But it’s just a nice friendly group.

I don’t know how much they actually get done.

Well, they seem to get a lot done, but I don’t do much.

But I mean, I just like to be there and like fly on the wall in these groups.

I mean, I’ll be there in the backlog meetings as well.

It’s just good to have a feeling about or just

Have your have your finger on the prostate of web development.

That’s it.

OK, so you’re going to where is it Kobe?

It’s in Kobe. So I’m flying this Friday.

It’s going to be a week there of meetings and greetings.

And then after that, I’m just getting a bit of rest and relaxation, or well, that’s the idea, but I’ll be rushing around Osaka to take some photos, which is right next door, and then spending a week in Tokyo, or as Makoto would say, Tokyo, Japan.

Not to be confused with Tokyo, Texas.

So yeah, I’ll be I’ll be going around very first time that I’m going to Japan.

I’m quite excited. So yeah.

Do you think, do you find that actually being in attendance, like having face-to-face meetings with is helpful or useful?

I think it certainly.

changes the dynamic in some meetings.

when you’re, when you’re, when everybody’s in Zoom with the best will in the world, you can try and enforce the right, we’re having a queue, raise your hand like you’ve had your hand up the entire thing,

to speak and everything else.

But in the end, there will be like three or four people that really like the sound of their voice.

And I’ll admit I’m one of them. And they’ll just.

But, particularly in online meetings, it’s very easy to basically dominate the meeting unless you’ve got some very strict moderators that make sure that everybody gets their say.

You know, it’s not everybody’s bag to just kind of unmute during a big meeting with like 50 participants and say, right, here’s my take on it.

And sometimes,

just by the nature of what’s discussed is not something that you can just get a quick, oh, quick gut feeling.

You know, let me just edit this. Let’s share it on the screen.

Does this look good for everybody?

It’s like sometimes it’s stuff that you want to just take your time and kind of, you know, ruminate a bit.

But I think the dynamic of that changes when everybody’s in the room, because then it’s a little bit easier to just maybe even just for the moderator to pick up

if you’re saying something in the meeting and I’m sitting next to you and I start rolling my eyes at what you’re saying, then the moderator might pick up on, Patrick, did you have a counterpoint to that?

Whereas if this was an online meeting, I’d be muted and I’ll say, well, that’s bollocks, but you know, nobody heard it because I’m muted.

So I think it changes the dynamic a little bit.

bit for that.

It also lends itself more to kind of collaborative work because the one thing I hate in when it’s online, when it’s like, let’s set up some breakout rooms and everybody will chat in there and then you come back into the main room.

It’s like that dynamic just doesn’t, for me at least, doesn’t work online.

The AgWag has these subgroups that keep going on.

I just sort of exit stage left.

I mean, because I’ve just found I’ve been in the subgroups and I don’t find them.

But besides that, I’ve sort of found somewhere to put my energies that being the WCAG-EM and that’s sort of working well.

But I do enjoy, as you say, well, I do enjoy spending time with people, but I always just find

TPAC to be a lot of people that are uncomfortable socially sort of being shoved.

Yeah, it’s kind of the gathering of the socially awkward.

Yeah, it’s interesting.

I just spend a lot of time in my room.

Yeah, I know, I know.

But yeah, the other thing that’s really helpful with, you know, the face-to-face aspect of TPAC is

Particularly when you’re trying to collaborate with other groups, it’s very often you end up kind of just following up e-mail after e-mail of, can we have a chat about this?

Can we do it?

And because of time zone differences and differences in, you know, how the group is made-up when they meet, it often, you know, doesn’t actually happen.

Whereas when you’re all physically there in the same time zone,

and you bump into each other, in break time between sessions and, at lunchtime, whatever, or in the evening at the bar, you might just, bump into somebody saying, look, I’ve been trying to get a moment with you.

Can we just, take 5 minutes and, I want to show you something on my laptop and, can we just,

panel beat this into something that both groups are happy with.

So it’s like many conferences, it’s the hallway conversations that kind of make those conferences.

That’s it’s the same difference between

You can go to an online conference and see all the sessions, but the experience is so much richer if you’re actually physically there and having the water cooler chats and the corridor chats with people afterwards.

I’m sure it’ll be a very productive time for you and an enjoyable time, and that’s part of the reason why I’m not going in UR because I’ve been through it.

I mean, I think that this year, as well as it being a long way away, it’s in Dublin next year.

I think I’ll go to that. We’ll both go to that.

But I think it is important for people such as yourself to represent the accessibility community and represent TetraLogical as our employers, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah. Thank you, Pat.

It’s been, well, I’d like to say it’s been illuminating.

Hopefully now. You’re not the illuminator.

So yeah, it can’t be illuminator.

We’ll ask, I’ve got quite a few people lined up.

Say hi to Mike Smith.

Yeah, will do.

While you’re there, try to get a picture with him.

That’d be great because I like my pitches.

And there’s still, I mean, there’s still lots of other questions that I could have asked you.

Maybe, if I do continue to do this and don’t get jack of it, you might even have a second bite at the cherry.

Yeah, excellent.

And then it’ll be like the semi-finals and the finals and then who’s…

Who’s the most resurrected on the fireside chat?

All right. Thank you, Pat.

I appreciate being the guinea pig and the and yeah, I’ll talk to you.

I’ll probably never talk to you again, but I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Yeah. Bye. Bye. See you later. Bye. Yeah.

How do I stop this? Yeah, how do I stop it? Yeah.

It’ll all look a lot better after the post-processing.

Absolutely.

Yeah, just give me flowing locks and Max Headroom style kind of stylings.

No, cool stuff. All right. Thanks. Thanks, Pat. Bye. Laters.

Some of the mentions in this chat

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Roky Erickson – Creature with the Atom Brain 1980

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