Transcript
Speaker: Made on Zencastr. Because Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform that really does make every stage of the podcast production and distribution processes so easy.
Speaker: All the details are in the description. Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Apocetor and people who think outside the box about how work works. with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
Speaker: I'm your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abasida. In this episode of The Independent Minds, I'm talking to Lisa Blankert about how AI is impacting Internet accessibility.
Speaker: Lisa runs Lab Online Agency in British Columbia, Canada, It is part of Canada that I have visited and I had a great time though when I was there. It's a fantastic place. If you get the opportunity to go, I highly recommend it.
Speaker: If I was going to be visiting British Columbia again, I would be making all of my travel arrangements with the Ultimate Travel Club because as a member of the Ultimate Travel Club, I have access to trade prices on all sorts of travel, flights, hotels, holidays, trains,
Speaker: all sorts of travel related purchases. You can join the Ultimate Travel Club as well by using the link in the description, which has a built-in discount. Now that I have paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to, and also good enough to share with your friends, family and work colleagues as well.
Speaker: As with every episode of The Independent Minds, We will not be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think. Hello, Lisa. Hello.
Speaker: How are you today? Doing well, thanks, and happy to be here. Thank you very much. How is British Columbia at the moment? At the moment, it's a little overcast, but it rains a lot here, and thankfully it's not raining.
Speaker: That is one of the things about British Columbia that I noticed when I visited was it was very much like the UK. There were lots of English accents and it was very wet. There was a lot of rain.
Speaker: But we need the rain for our trees and so can't complain too much about that. No, and there are some very, very big forests and of course the mountains help create the rain as well, I suppose.
Speaker: But I remember that time very fondly. You are based in just outside Vancouver, I believe. Yes, exactly. Right, so out in the country.
Speaker: Yeah, a little bit further in the country, not too far in the middle of nowhere. Good, but an area where you get bears and things then kept perhaps. Yeah, once in a blue moon we do have bears, black bears.
Speaker: Good stuff. So tell me a little bit about Lab Online Agency. What is it that you do? Yeah, so thank you for asking. at my agency, we help small business owners, mostly service-based business owners, become more visible online. So whether that's helping them to create a website, if they don't already have one for their small business, we also rebrand websites to make them more up-to-date. And we don't just build websites that are one and done. We create websites that are ever-evolving. So we create websites that are not only just something that people visit, they're ever evolving and they gain a lot of traffic. So we don't want to be creating these websites that no one sees. So we also help get more traffic to websites for people through search engine optimization. And we help these businesses become seen online online. mostly through Google search. So if people don't know about SEO, basically what what it does is is it connects people that are already searching for many of these services online on Google. And now with AI, we're seeing what's called generative engine optimization. So people that are on things like ChatGPT can be finding these business in those search results as well. And that's also a service that we offer included. So basically what we're doing is we're getting getting these websites to become more visible, get more traffic to them and increase those conversions. So we're doing that from a marketing realm.
Speaker: Nice. but You're outside of the big city and remote. How is it that you get your own customers if you're not in a big city? Yeah, that's a great question. i do a lot of networking. So we were fortunate here that in Vancouver, we have some great networking communities where we can connect with like-minded individuals. So doing a lot of networking and meeting people in person, which is a great way to meet people because it drags you away from your computer and you can get to know some of these people on a personal level as well as a business level. And so, yeah, we're fortunate to have that here and
Speaker: um you know, just to be able to connect with these individuals that um is basically tied to the reason why you started this podcast, people that ah like to think outside the box and, you know, facilitate some of these discussions, whether it's over a dinner, over a breakfast with a speaker. So it's it's great here that we have a lot of those opportunities to network with other small business owners.
Speaker: Great, great. So we're here today to talk about artificial intelligence and internet accessibility. What got you interested in in that as a subject?
Speaker: Yeah, so if you if if I didn't touch on this as well, my background is also in psychology and working within the public school system. So I spent nearly a decade Working in the public school system, I work with a lot of special needs students. And um here in British Columbia, Canada, in our public school system, the model of inclusion is built. So what that looks like is every student, whether they're special needs or whether they have any barriers to inclusion,
Speaker: education, they're included in our school system and we find ways to adapt. So ways that they can be receiving education, the ways that they can be, you know, receiving the information from their teachers. So I worked in that industry for a very long time. So that's a very important topic to me. It's something I'm very passionate about. So the web developer that I now work with is also passionate about that. And so we can build websites that are accessible for everyone.
Speaker: And there is even compliance around that it's called, um, WCAG compliance. And what that means is we're building websites that, you know, people with low vision and things like that, they can still read these websites. So we're thinking about everyone when we're building a website, we're not just throwing it up, assuming that people, can view it because some people might have some struggles in being able to view it and we want to allow people to view these websites. It sounds like one of those sorts of things that's a nice to do.
Speaker: Absolutely. There are a small number of people in the world who have some sort of impediment or disability which makes it more difficult for them to access the internet and to play devil's advocate for a moment.
Speaker: It feels like a ah nice thing to do but what you're saying is that there's also like a ah legal a legal need to make your website accessible to a people regardless of their disabilities as well.
Speaker: Yes, that's true. And I've also worked, um I've worked in, um you know, a lot of companies that are, for lack of better term, they're startup companies, so they're growing and they're small and new. And yeah, i worked in the industry of compliance, so it's very important for everyone to be looking at you know, how am I addressing this in my small business? Because it's it's really important to make sure that we're thinking of everyone. We're not just making assumptions about, um you know, the fact that everyone can see the website in a certain way. So I think it's really important to make these considerations and think about um different variables there. Okay. I won't disagree with you, but again, you know, it all costs money.
Speaker: So what you see as being like the return on investment if I, as a small business owner, decide I'm going to make my website more accessible.
Speaker: Nice thing to do. I'll meet the requirements of the legislation around equality of opportunity, etc. But what should I be thinking of in terms of a return on that investment for my organization?
Speaker: Yeah, that's an excellent question. i think that It's great return on investment because people that face these struggles in accessing websites, they're limited to the people that have made these considerations. So you're opening yourself up in that sense. So I think that to answer your question in short, there is a return on investment there.
Speaker: Yes. And it's basically the people with these and challenges in accessing the internet, also people who have money in their pockets.
Speaker: Yeah. And they're people that, um you know, they've created businesses as well, whether they're for profit or non for profit businesses. I know a local lady that she's created a small non for profit in regards to accessibility. So in her non for profit, she helps people get around town and Not everyone um can get around town in the same way, just due to our infrastructure and the way the roads are built. We don't think of these things if you don't struggle with it, you know, sometimes there's curves on the side of the road and it's challenging for people to get around. So I think it's important that we think of everyone and how they may be like the user experience, right? What's the user experience for everyone? And user experience is a huge part of building a website too.
Speaker: That's true. User experience is the is the, well, it is the thing that will keep someone on your website to get to the point where they're actually going to make a purchase or process, progress their inquiry. But there's also separate technology that you can put onto a website to make it more accessible for people. What you're saying is that you should, as a,
Speaker: when you're building a website, when you're designing it you should include all those sort of considerations within a website. Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, it might not be for everyone, but, and it's a sometimes a special consideration, but I think it's important to like like we're doing today, start the conversation about it and talk about it with more people as well.
Speaker: Yes. What's been one of the things that you've included in a website to make it more accessible that you think, yeah, more people wouldn't have thought that that was important. So what are the sort of things that you provided on websites? Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker: so some of the things that we're doing to, um, like stand out just as an agency is, We're including, well, this is more to do with transparency, but we're also including, and this is a controversial topic as well too, like the starting in point in an investment. Some people don't include that ah information on their website. However, it could be informative to people and that way, you know, they don't have to po book a separate call with you. just to learn, okay, what what price investment do I need for this website? So one of my mentors taught me that it's important to be transparent and transparency also builds trust. If you're being transparent on your website and showing this is what we offer and this is what we do, Here's our portfolio and here's our past work. It's building trust and credibility with people because a lot of people will look at a website and go like, what's this? And so we want to make them stay on these websites longer. We want to build trust with people and show them this is what we're doing. Now, ai
Speaker: is artificial intelligence and how that impacts people's accessibility to the internet. so AI, artificial intelligence and the Internet Accessibility AI, IA, as I've been saying.
Speaker: There's a whole debate about what artificial intelligence actually is. How do you define artificial intelligence? That's an excellent question. i mean, artificial intelligence, it's hard to put a definition to it, but basically um it's advancements in um you know how we can move forward. And I look at artificial intelligence and I like to include evolution in the definition of it. I believe that it's part of evolution in the way that we move forward in society. You can agree or disagree with me on that. But basically what it is, is in a nutshell, is our evolution of society and technology.
Speaker: I don't disagree with you, but I'm wondering about the bit of artificial intelligence and what it can actually think of. What I've seen of artificial intelligence so far is that it can do things that are quite amazing. It can predict what it is that I'm planning to do from the information that I have given it.
Speaker: That's one thing. And it can help me find search results in super quick time and it can present them in all sorts of different ways and it can summarize uh conversations or documents very well so i know that it's artificial because it's not a human being and i know there's some elements of intelligence about it but it's like i so once described it as super fast memory super fast memory recall and um that's an excellent people don't agree with me all the time but how do you see artificial intelligence impacting the way in which people get internet accessibility yeah this is a very fascinating conversation i think that AI and as as much as we're seeing in some of these um
Speaker: you know, whether it's chat GPT or another platform, we're seeing, like you said, it's a lot of data and a lot of information and we have these tools, but we're also learning how do we prompt these tools and how do we direct this information? And like you said, it's not a human being. So um a lot of people are saying, yeah, it's it's not ultimately human, but it can present some great information. So when we link the idea of accessibility for websites and artificial intelligence. I think there, um, there's a lot going on there and we have to look at, okay, what is the way that we're wording things on these website? How are, how are we, um, relating this to Google as well too? Because, uh, a lot of, i talk to a lot of web developers every day that say, you know, we're filling in the gaps with artificial intelligence and building websites as well, because
Speaker: While we can prompt and we can do some amazing things with artificial intelligence, we also are seeing it and ah people would disagree with me, but we're also seeing it present new problems. For example, we're seeing mass layoffs in companies that also, this is kind of going in your realm because I know you have an HR background, but we're seeing mass layoffs and people saying we can outsize outsource this to AI, especially in the world of websites. And they might say, maybe AI can make these websites more accessible for our department and lay off the whole department and outsource to AI, but we still need someone directing the AI. And the AI might make more problems in the sense of if something breaks, we don't really understand yet how some of these websites are created with the AI. It's like creating a house and you don't understand the materials you made it with. So then if something breaks in it and that or if the foundation isn't set properly and we don't even understand how it was created, how are going to fix it when it breaks? So we're seeing that a lot online.
Speaker: Has AI become something that has taken over in that respect then? It has, but in some ways I'm seeing, um and you know even when you go to the self-checkout in a grocery store, you can talk to a lot of the people that um basically they're in charge of you know when the the machine makes an error, for example, or it's collecting money, they're seeing that it's creating new problems that they're having to face. So like, you know, the people are rolling their eyes going, okay, this is great. But at the same time, it's presenting new problems. So I think that's a an huge issue going on with the artificial intelligence. We're getting excited and seeing how can create some really great things. However, I think people are not looking into like, how are we fixing it? How is this actually built?
Speaker: Because with websites, there's something called vibe coding and a lot of people are using and going, Oh, this is very neat. We can create a website. Um, we can, people are using it to create apps. However, we're not looking at, um, how are we going to fix it when it breaks quite yet? So that's really going to look different, you know, in a few years from now, when we're looking at, okay, how are we fixing all these things created by the AI? Because right now a lot of people are just trying to create, right?
Speaker: Yeah, we haven't thought about what happens when it breaks and technology does have a habit of letting us down at the most important moments. So true. I suppose, but you what is going to happen if it breaks?
Speaker: It's a good question. We don't have an answer to it yet. But one of the things I'm wondering about with the accessibility and the use of AI, is could you tell AI we want to make this website more accessible for people with ADHD, for example?
Speaker: Would the AI be able to design the website or present the website in a format that would say these are the requirements of someone with ADHD. Yeah, and ADHD business owners become very successful. And there's a lot of research on that as too in terms of ADHD business owners and the way that they work. So I think that that that could be very well developed. So absolutely, you can create a website for someone with ADHD using some AI prompting.
Speaker: The AI then has the potential, if it is given the correct information, to actually create something which would be suitable for someone with specific conditions, as long as we have the information about what those people need. Yes. and so so Now, does it do that type of thing at the design stage, or could someone go onto a website and say, know, I want to look at your website, but I have
Speaker: vision issues and ADHD present your website to me in a way that is going to accommodate my needs. Is that sort of technology available at the moment? I would say in some ways it is and in some ways it isn't because um We can create websites that the AI chatbot is implemented into the website.
Speaker: And the web developers have told me that those are very costly. So it is possible to basically make a website that is catered towards specific people, which is really fascinating and really exciting.
Speaker: It's very costly at this point in time. It can be done. So absolutely, you could create a website and then have the AI chatbot basically implemented into the website. But like I said, it would cost more money as it's more infrastructure involved with the website.
Speaker: That's really the big issue about all of this, isn't it? If we come back to that return on the investment, how valuable is it to the individual and how valuable is it to the organization that owns the website? and The website in many ways is what brings the two together.
Speaker: So if you land on a website and it's not working for you because you have a condition, then you're going to move away from it and the customer has been lost. Exactly. Yeah. We want to avoid that. Yeah. That's the return on the investment, but you cannot create it. Well, I suppose you can create a website that is suitable for every condition.
Speaker: regardless of what it might be, whether it's somebody's vision, whether it's their ability to use their hands, or it's some sort of cognitive element to it as well. You would end up with lots and lots and lots of websites for each one.
Speaker: Yeah. But like I said, that it's very interesting that with artificial intelligence, um, and the question you brought up was very fascinating that, you know, we can be implementing these AI chat bots right on the website and the way it's developed and be catering to people with different needs.
Speaker: So the, the person with the special need would tell the computer that the website, when they landed on that website, hi, the day. I have got this condition. Present the information to me in this way.
Speaker: Yeah, that would be if the person has that set up on their website. However, um where we are right now with AI, it would have to be the website owner that has that set up and then the person might be able to come to them and say, hey, can you allow me to view it? That would be the five-star gold-plated version of internet accessibility for people who needed something that was different to the mass of the population.
Speaker: Tell me about your website in the search engine optimization. I will go to it. When I get there, you're then going to build this immediate relationship with me and say, do you need to access our website in a special way?
Speaker: Tell us about it in the chat box and then the website presents itself in a way that is most accessible to the individual because of their condition.
Speaker: I love this conversation because we're talking about creating something that is useful and constructive and I see a lot of ways that artificial intelligence is is not constructive to people. So I think it's refreshing to talk to people that are thinking like yourself, where, you know, how can we innovate and how can we help more people in these ways? And, you know, we're we're talking about it with websites, but it's really nice to see because obviously artificial intelligence can bring negativity as well when it's not being used constructively. Yes.
Speaker: Yeah. It's harnessing the constructive aspects of technology. before you worry about those aspects of technology which are less positive. But the impact that this sort of thing can have on someone's life can be dramatic.
Speaker: And yet some aspects of visibility or accessibility of the internet can be very basic as well. We're talking about some very fancy type of applications for artificial intelligence.
Speaker: But simply having your website available in a larger print can also improve accessibility. And I found out that in the UK, larger print is defined as Times New Roman with a font size of 14, which is not that bigger, much bigger to size 12, which tends to be the one that people use most often.
Speaker: Yeah. And um when we talk about fonts, they play a large role in not only the way people are reading the website, but the way your website is branded. So it's very fascinating to look at how fonts can really change the way your website's being presented. So I find it really fascinating that you've brought up up fonts and, you know, we're looking at, we should be using fonts that are user-friendly and readable. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking about creating a website, do think about the way that,
Speaker: the font impacts the way that people are reading. I try to use font that yeah is is nice on the eyes and people can read it. think the point is that in order to make something more accessible to someone with a visible or visibility issues, you don't need to necessarily make some dramatic changes. Just increasing the size of the font by a small amount can increase the accessibility of that website to people with visual impairments. Yes. So it's these small things. And I think that's a great point because when we look at some of the compliance guidelines, it can overwhelm some people and they think, oh, you know, that's too tough to do. So I think what you brought up is very important to you to look at. Maybe there are some little ways we can make it easier for people.
Speaker: It is, like you say, a fascinating subject and one that as the technology develops, we'll be able to enhance the lives of many, many people who have some sort of disability or impairment, which makes engaging with the internet more difficult. But, you know, aa it is such a fascinating subject and I do thank you for today and also wish you the best of luck with the lab online agency. Thank you so much. so Thank you very much.
Speaker: Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abaseela, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind Lisa Blankert from Lab Online Agency.
Speaker: You can find out more about both of us by like using the links in the description. When we're thinking about disability and accessibility, we should also be thinking about our own health and how the decisions that we make today could impact our health in the future.
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Speaker: I am sure you will have enjoyed listening to this episode of the Independent Minds as much as Lisa and i have enjoyed making it. So please give it a like and download it so you can listen anytime, anywhere.
Speaker: To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. You'll probably also want to share the link with your friends and family and work colleagues as well. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abusida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think.
Speaker: Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.
