Leaders for Accessibility Summit: Digital Inclusion Day

Accessible event ticketing: from a new perspective

Speaker: Craig Pryde

I really appreciated how honest and to the point that Craig was about navigating life with a stammer. With events and music being an escape for him, it brought to light a huge problem in the industry around booking tickets. The statistics around people with disabilities being put off or unsuccessful in booking tickets for events is staggering, but even so they miss capturing the emotion of being excluded, or it being made to feel unequal.

He outlined the emotional experience behind the traditional booking experience, with excitement, booking tickets as soon as a sale starts and enter some information. Half hour, tops. For someone attempting to do the same thing, it can easily take days. Everything from travel, building access, and more needs to be answered. Booking is difficult or even impossible online due to missing content or forcing them to book using alternative methods, and they often miss out due to being deprioritized or other issues with event venues, staff, etc.

These types of struggles inspired Craig to launch Different Breed, which empowers people with disabilities to book tickets with similar ease to everyone else, with only four steps. They're able to see in real time what accommodations are available, and book without the same headaches. They're also working on a system to help event venues create accessibility guides based on personal needs, and hope to create an entire ecosystem around accessible event experiences to make the process easier on both sides. I know I for one would love to see this initiative grow beyond the UK and start up in the US.

Accessibility for designers: beyond colors and fonts

Speaker: Tal Kailler

Tal is one of the developers of the Design Assistant Figma plugin, it claims not to require designers to be experts with accessibility, but instead helps them to follow accessible design practices in multiple ways. One of the ways is the Design system, which is the components used in the design. It also helps with Layout, which is the assembly of components into a cohesive experience. It guides designers to think through the different states of components, such as a button being focused, disabled, etc. She made a demo that showed how the Design Assistant was able to evaluate all of the variants of a component and flag anything that might have an accessibility issue, such as color contrast, It also helps with the handoff between designers and developers so that components can be properly built out. Their layout was also cool, allowing designers to annotate their documents with what HTML semantics should be used.

I think this tool is really cool, but it's unfortunate that you have to pay for it. I think that it's a nice point of entry for designers looking to include accessibility best practices but don't know where to start. Luckily, our RDG design/UX team is blessed with a good foundation of accessibility knowledge, not to mention front-end savvy, so we're able to follow best practices using other means.

Locked out: why we can't buy what you're selling

Speakers: Clive Loseby, Craig Pryde, Brian Dalton

This was a good panel, and highlighted issues that are unfortunately still very prevalent today. Around 95% of the top 1 million sites still have notable accessibility barriers. There is still a lack of awareness and understanding around people with disabilities and web usage. Clive made a good point that it's impossible to measure how many disabled people aren't using your website, since they're simply not using it. But if we make improvements that help them, they improve the experience for others as well.

Some other blockers are minimizing the methods by which a person can purchase, renew, cancel, or seek support. For example, requiring a phone call to cancel a subscription just so a salesperson can convince the person to renew is only caring about profit, not about the customer experience or their needs.

I also found some of their views regarding AI interesting, and how there are gaps in that technology as well. For Clive, AI that captures and interprets speaking is very useful for taking notes during a presentation. For Craig, it is unusable because he has a stammer, and it has not been built in a way to be able to correctly interpret stammering. In the past, this was an issue with accents in the Americas, especially for those for whom English was not their first language.

They also discussed the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming out on June 28, 2025. Whether you reside in the EU or not, it will affect you if your website does business over there, and eventually beyond that as other countries and continents adopt their own policies. This was true for the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and it will likely be rule for the EAA.

The panelists expressed concern over the use of overlays, both from the fact that they often make the experience worse or unusable for users, but that they're sponsored ads at the top of the lists for companies researching how to improve their website accessibility, who become enticed by the promise of a quick fix. Instead, we need to fix issues from a provider point of view, whether it be development shops, or easy build site platforms like Wix and Squarespace.

Overall, this was an excellent panel. Preaching to the choir, for sure. I'll be looking more into Fable, which provides several resources and connections to people with disabilities for research and testing purposes. We can be pragmatic and take steps, however small, to make improvements. Because it's better than doing nothing at all.

Reframing accessibility as a source of UX innovation

Speaker: Charlie Triplett

Innovation is a popular buzzword in the realm of product creation and optimization. The good news is, innovation isn't just for big expensive think tanks, it's for everyone. Charlie brought up a familiar bell curve of users of a product, with the point being that most people design for the middle of the bell curve, or for the most people. But for innovation, as well as accessibility, we gain insights from the ends of the bell curve, from users who interact with our products differently than the "average" user. He brought up different types of innovations with different ranges of definition and predictability, but the most predictable and well-defined is sustaining innovation, such as feature roadmaps, UX outcomes, reliability, and team engagement.

Charlie pointed out that accessibility falls under this category of predictable innovation. He gave some examples of some products that were initially created to address issues encountered by people with disabilities, but were validated as innovative and useful by the middle of the bell curve. Below are some ways that accessibility falls under predictable, sustaining innovation

1. Roadmaps. Accessibility knowledge can help make faster UI decisions and avoid issues that need remediation later. 
2. UX outcomes. The POUR principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust) help guide UX decisions, and predict whether solutions will be positively received.
3. Reliability. Accessibility also helps determine whether a product can be operated by multiple means/and work everywhere agnostic of browser or device.
4. Team engagement. Employees that are dedicated to learning and applying best practices and emotionally engaged in their work cost less than those who are disengaged, since they're less likely to build things that need to be remediated later.

This was a great talk that helped to sell accessibility both innovative and stable at the same time. I could see tips being useful both in client engagement as well as internally.

The ROI on accessibility: is it time to measure impact on business outcomes?

Speaker: Niamh Kelly

People with disabilities have money to spend, and want to buy products just like everyone else. But too often they're locked out of the process by an insurmountable barrier. Niamh points out that the issue isn't often at the top of the sales funnel where advertising dollars are spent, but it on the webpages themselves. There can be issues with functionality, layout, and/or language that prevent people from doing what they came there to do.

She especially focused on language and page style, which, if done in an accessible way, can reduce cognitive load and remove other barriers. Issues like these can be discovered by gaging time spent on the page vs. conversion rates. Long page times with low conversion rates implies that there are issues with understanding content or intended user flows. Making updates to simplify language and make user experiences more to the point, users can spend less time on pages, but conversion rates go up. Way to widen that sales funnel, folks!

Techniques and tactics to align engineering and design teams

Speakers: Kevin Berg, Charlie Triplett, Anna Mészáros

This panel was centered around things like getting buy-in for accessibility in projects, and ways to bake it in along the process and collaborate. I liked that Anna made a point that the approach to handling accessibility can look really different depending on the size of your company, which really resonated with me. As a member of a small (mid-sized now?) agency, we don't have the infrastructure to support many of the grand approaches used by big companies and corporations. So figuring out what works based on your size is important.

They also discussed the need for flexible tools, and that accessibility isn't always black and white. Sure, there is testable criteria that is pass/fail, but many aspects are more nuanced, or have multiple solutions.

Something else important when making accessibility improvements is to allow quick wins. Don't look at it as a whole. Fix the color contrast here. The keyboard navigation there. The functional widget on that page. These can help with quick wins, measurable progress, and overall morale.

"Shifting left" is another popular term in the accessibility community lately, and came up here. The difference between a $17,000 fix and a $700 fix comes from discovering and fixing the issue earlier in the process. While I fully agree with this mentality, I'm hoping "shifting left" stops being such a buzz phrase, simply due to the fact that it's being done and is the new normal!

End of day two

Overall, this was a good conference. I liked the change of focus from day one to day two, and it got me thinking more about neuro-divergence and positioning accessibility in terms of internal education/ability as well as make the sell. Thanks, Leaders for Accessibility!