“Managing Reputational Risk; Episode 15” The issue of accessibility

Grant Bather:

Hi, and welcome to the Rostrum agency’s Managing Reputational Risk podcast with me, Grant Bather. In this series of podcasts, I’ll be discussing crisis and reputation management from a public relations and media perspective. I’ll take a look at the definition of a crisis, what it feels like to be engulfed in a media storm, the role of a crisis communications team, and what steps businesses and individuals can take to minimize media exposure around reputational risk. Each episode, I’ll be joined by guests who will give their unique insight into managing reputational risk.

And of course, I’ll give my take from a PR perspective. Having started my career as a journalist before becoming a company spokesperson and PR professional, I’ve seen all angles of a crisis. So, join me and my guests as we delve into the issues that play into managing reputational risk. In today’s episode, I’m delighted to be joined by Johny Cassidy. As a BBC journalist and co-chair of the BBC’s Disabled Staff Network, Johny is a fervent advocate for accessibility. We’ll be delving into the much-anticipated Accessibility Act and finding out what organizations can and should do to ensure they meet the upcoming guidelines. Johny, the first question I ask every guest: how do you define a crisis?

Johny Cassidy:

That’s a good question. I guess crises come in many shapes and forms, don’t they? But I suppose it’s something maybe that you haven’t planned for. You know, in all my time working at the BBC, as a producer, as a journalist, as a project manager, I’d like to think that I try to manage risk and head off crises before they become crises and have plans in place to mitigate those crises. But obviously, as we know, things don’t always go like that. So, I guess for me, in answer to your question, a crisis is something that’s maybe an unforeseen, we’ve heard the term before, Black Swan event, haven’t we? It’s something that you haven’t mitigated for or mitigated against, and something that catches you off guard, perhaps, and you have to scramble to try and do something to head it off at the pass before it really explodes.

Grant Bather:

Absolutely. And on that Black Swan event, or things maybe that organizations should have prepared for but haven’t, and as your role as part of the BBC’s accessibility disability side of things, there is some regulation coming in the next couple of years. Are organizations treating that as a bit of a Black Swan event that they’re not yet planning for and they should be?

Johny Cassidy:

I guess we’re thinking about a Black Swan event as something that isn’t on the horizon. Who would have seen a global pandemic? Who would have had that in their risk management process? So, I suppose you can think about things. Should we have plans for a meteor hitting your building? Should we have plans for a tidal wave swamping London? Who knows? Maybe we should. But what you’re talking about is the European Accessibility Act that’s coming in 2025. Yes, and I would like to think that all businesses should be thinking about it. And if they haven’t, then I would suggest they really start planning for it.

Because although you might not think that it impacts you as a business, I think the simple bottom line is that it does. Just as a bit of background, the European Accessibility Act is a broad piece of legislation coming into place in 2025. It means that anybody selling products, any digital products that include online services, but the beautiful thing about it, in terms of accessibility, is that it encompasses anything that is digital: radios, TVs, phones, cash machines, ticket terminals, anything that people are making, producing, selling into the European market needs to adhere to these new accessibility guidelines and rules. I think the thing that people might not think about is that if you are supplying it into the EU, it’s everybody across the world who has any customers at all in the EU market that sell those sorts of things.

Johny Cassidy:

And if you are a business, perhaps in the UK, that doesn’t sell into the European market, you might think, “Right, okay, well, I’m off the hook for this. I don’t really need to,” but I think it’s really worth thinking about the aids that your competitors are going to have, who do sell into that market, who do make their products more accessible, to adhere to the guidance. It means that they’ve got the edge on you, and you’re going to fall behind, because we know that making stuff accessible just for disabled people has the knock-on effect of making it far better and more usable for everybody.

Grant Bather:

Absolutely. And that leads itself to the Purple Pound and Purple Tuesday, which says there’s an audience of £249bn.

Johny Cassidy:

It’s more than that, Grant. I think it’s more. I think it’s £274bn. It’s always rising, isn’t it? An estimated. And it’s not just disabled people; it’s disabled people and their families. That’s the important thing to understand. So no matter how much money we’re talking about, whether it be what you said or the increased £274 billion, it’s a heck of a lot of money that your businesses could and should be chasing.

Grant Bather:

Absolutely. And do you think firms right now are doing enough on the accessibility front and reaching that audience?

Johny Cassidy:

Yes and no. Would I say that the landscape, the environment, the climate for accessibility is as good as it could be? Absolutely not. No way. Nowhere near. Now, if we’re thinking just about websites, WebAIM, who are an organization in America who look… They do an accessibility report on the top million home pages across the world every year. They estimate that around 96% of all of the websites on the internet have some sort of accessibility issue. You would hope that is going down. I can certainly see and experience a better environment for accessibility. I’m a screen reader user, so accessibility impacts me, not just in my job and what I’m passionate about, but as an end user, as a simple user journey.

If I go onto a website now that isn’t accessible and I want to buy something, I bounce straight away. You’ll bounce away from it straight away. And I’m not the only one doing that because there are going to be websites that do it, and the user experience is going to be far better. It’s going to be far nicer; it’s not going to be as frustrating. And ultimately, they are going to get my cash, and the ones that are doing it better will get my cash, and the ones that aren’t won’t.

Grant Bather:

Yeah, absolutely. And on that front, are there those industry players looking at it and just going, “Right, this is the next thing that I can look at, that I can make money really quickly.” Whether it be accessibility, website scrapers, and things like that, people need to be aware of.

Johny Cassidy:

Absolutely.

Grant Bather:

If they are looking to make changes to their websites to make them more accessible.

Johny Cassidy:

Absolutely. And it’s a really good point. There’s a myriad of companies out there that promise the world, and I’m talking about overlays. And if anybody wants to believe in overlays, I’ve got a whole load of magic beans that they can have for a really knocked-down price. Overlays promise but can’t deliver. Just as a bit of background, again, about overlays: Overlays are a piece of software, a piece of code. Companies say to businesses, “Look, if you want to make your website accessible, use this piece of code. We will put it on for you at a premium rate. Suddenly, your website is accessible.” That’s not the case. Nine times out of ten, it’s not just that it doesn’t make it accessible; it actually impacts the stuff on your website that is accessible.

There’s been a whole load of consortium, or a consortium of people, different industry bodies, and accessibility experts that have got together and put out a lot of comms about overlays as a warning to people. But obviously, there are going to be people that believe it. But I would just say, avoid people that promise you the world and overlays and something like it because the bottom line is they’re snake oil.

Grant Bather:

Front, there will be a lot of organizations, a lot of businesses looking at how to make their websites more accessible. So if overlays aren’t the solution, what kind of things should they be looking at? What tools, what services, what solutions? What things can they do to improve their accessibility?

Johny Cassidy:

Well, I suppose there are different choices, aren’t there? If you’re a small organization and you’re buying in your web design, your website design, and you’re getting someone to manage it, within your procurement contract or within your procurement policy, when you’re looking to tender out to people and putting that out there, make accessibility one of the pillars. A lot of people now look at sustainability, for example. It’s a bit of a red line that businesses have to be sustainable. That’s what customers are interested in. They’re not adding to the carbon footprint. So the same can be said for accessibility. If you have that as a stipulation when you’re going out to tender, and you understand a bit about accessibility and stay clear of overlays, as we said, there are people, there are web designers…

It’s becoming really hot in the development world that people understand what accessibility is. And we’re not just talking about screen reader users. I think estimates in the UK, around 24% of people have some sort of impairment or condition. If we think about that, about blind people, which is the most obvious, that have got constraints for accessibility, but then there are people that have got cognitive differences, that don’t use a website in the same way. There are people who’ve got motor impairments, that they need to use other input devices rather than a mouse. And if you think of all these things, and if you get someone to help design for all those different potential customers, it’s going to have a real big impact on your bottom line. If you’re a bigger organization, you could be embedding it into what it is that you’re doing.

If you build or buy, there are different choices that you have to do, but people should be aware of it, and there are lots of people on the web that you can talk to. There’s a hashtag #a11y, and I can’t remember; it’s one of those words, isn’t it? And there’s a name for them, words that stand for something as a shortcut. But #a11y is about digital accessibility. So that eleven in the middle is the number of letters that is in between the A and Y. So if you do #a11y, you’ll find a myriad of dozens, loads and loads of people talking about it. The community is very welcoming. People will be only too willing to help.

I would say for businesses wanting to do it, don’t be afraid; it has to start somewhere. There’s a really sort of big accessibility guru called Sherry Byrne-Haber, which is known. Her mantra is, “Accessibility isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a culture to be built.” And it is, yeah. And if you think of it like that, you want to be spreading it all across your business and not just for some web developers sitting in a corner who are the ones tasked with it. You need to be thinking if you want to embed true accessibility, it is a culture.

And that has to go from all your internal comms, your external comms, the tools that you use, the buildings that you have, the flexible working arrangements, even that you offer people, and all those things added together really go some ways to break down the social barriers that disabled people face. And if you get rid of all those barriers, then it’s going to have a net positive impact on your business.

Grant Bather:

Absolutely. And it’s about doing it all the time and not just when the spotlight is on you or when there is a special day in the calendar, for example, in a Purple Tuesday, where you’ll see brands kind of shouting about what they’re doing around the issue and then they’ll go quiet for the rest of the year. I don’t know if you’ve got anything you wanted to add to that point.

Johny Cassidy:

Absolutely. Well, Purple Tuesday, for people that don’t know, Purple Tuesday, it happens in November every year. I think it just happened a couple of weeks ago, beginning of November, I think. And it is a fantastic initiative, really. It’s a time to highlight the value of that purple pound, the £249bn or £274bn that you highlighted. And it’s to make businesses aware that disabled people have got money to spend and they’re wanting to spend money. So it’s trying to make businesses aware of that, to make them invite and make them accessible. But as you say, there are lots of people that jump on that bandwagon and they don’t do it right. We’ve seen this before in marketing, haven’t we? When it’s Pride Month, people sticking the wee rainbow thing onto their Twitter or X bio, as you say, going quiet for the rest of the year.

But disabled people, it’s a similar thing. Disabled people understand authenticity, and they can sniff out people that aren’t authentic a mile away. And there was like Purple Tuesday when it just happened. There were dozens of businesses that were called out by the disabled community for doing exactly as you say. You’re trying to jump onto the bandwagon; they’re putting up images on their tweets, on their posts, on X that didn’t have any alt text, and professing to be champions of accessibility and just things like that, failures like that, just obvious fails, just make people think right. Okay, well, no thanks, chum.

Grant Bather:

Yeah. And going back to your point, around that community that’s out there, how do organizations educate themselves around these issues so that they are, come 2025, they are already. But even before then, making sure that their services, their solutions meet as many people as possible?

Johny Cassidy:

Well, there are dozens and dozens of different consultants and people out there that will help you and guide you through it. They’re obviously not for free. You’re doing it as a business. There are organizations like the Business Disability Forum, for example. There are other consultancies like Tetralogical, sorry. Or AbilityNet, or they’re there, willing and able to guide people through and to help people through. But if you’re going to do it, you have to commit to it. There’s no point in saying, “Right, okay, yeah. Want to make this accessible,” and throwing a few thousand at it. If you’re going to do it, you have to do it right and really do it for the long haul. And there’s no such thing as a 100% accessible website. There can’t be because things move so quickly. Making a website accessible for one demographic could make it inaccessible for another.

Johny Cassidy:

So it’s just about understanding who your audience is and engaging. There’s a lot of PR kudos to be had from it if you’re going to do it right. A lot of the big tech firms, like Microsoft, have been unbelievably good. They’ve really set the standard. LinkedIn and Slack have been fantastic. These businesses, Slack and LinkedIn, for example, in the past, haven’t been so great for accessibility, but they’ve really taken it and run with it because they can see the value of it.

Grant Bather:

Yeah. So what changes have they made that you’ve noticed?

Johny Cassidy:

I think it’s a really good example. They’ve stripped out their UI, their user interface, broke it down, and built it right up from the ground so it is accessible. It’s slicker, it’s sleeker, and a screen reader can use it with ease. It’s this universal design philosophy, isn’t it? Everybody can use it. So I’m really impressed with what they’ve done. I’m really impressed with what LinkedIn has done. It’s the same. They’ve engaged at a high level—developers, IT architects, accessibility experts. But the messaging is coming from the chief exec down, that this is the sort of thing we need to be doing. It makes it better for everybody.

Grant Bather:

Like you said, it’s making sure that message steeps down and it’s truly ingrained in the business. I do a lot of media training, and some of the topics that I talk about are things like board diversity. One organization I’ll go in and train them, and they’ll say, “We’re really keen on board diversity, and we’re telling all our clients about it.” Then I go and have a look at their website, and their own board is anything but diverse.

So it’s about bringing in the knowledge of the things you don’t know, finding the people who do know what it is, and skilling it around that. And getting insight into the people that have those issues to make sure that everything they’re building, the services, the solutions, the websites, the user interface, as you said, is appropriate to the people that not only you want to reach but you might be reaching anyway.

Johny Cassidy:

Yeah, absolutely. But I wouldn’t use the term “issues.” There’s a danger in saying, “Right, okay, we’re building for people with issues.” You’re building for a big massive chunk of the community who are different. It’s not necessarily an issue; it’s a difference. And if you engage with that, I think neurodiversity is a big, massive thing that we’re going to see a lot of people really take a lot more seriously now. Forever, I guess society has been built around what has been perceived as that normative brain function, and it’s just not the case. And we’re really at the forefront, in the foothills, of what we understand about those differences and the way different people are wired and the way different people work. You will see it in schools, and we’ll see it in businesses.

A lot of times, we’re just not set up to really allow people that are wired differently to flourish and to blossom and to grow. And the businesses that are understanding that, they think they’ve got it. It’s understanding that a chief exec doesn’t know what he or she doesn’t know, and they think, “Right, okay, well, why do we need that? We don’t have any disabled clients.” I think you do. If 24% of the population has some sort of impairment, disability, or condition, then you most certainly do. So I think it’s crucial to have that difference of thought and allow people, if you’re bringing them into your organization because of the difference, don’t expect them to coalesce around the culture that already exists.

If you’re bringing people in because of the difference, allow that difference to be embedded into the culture to really make the business grow.

Grant Bather:

Yeah. That is a massive opportunity for organizations. 2025, this legislation coming in is probably likely to be just the start. So you can expect organizations, and it might. Looking at that date, was it 14 months off or so, it could wake up. A lot of organizations go, “Right. We’ve met these guidelines; we’ve met these principles. Now look who we’re reaching. What can we do next?” Do you see it that way?

Johny Cassidy:

Yeah, I do, absolutely. And again, this is about authenticity. Businesses are businesses. If you look at the return on investment that you’re getting by investing in accessibility and by investing in diversity, I’m not sure that any business would come and say, “Look, we put 50k into accessibility, and our business dropped off.” I don’t think that would happen. I might be wrong. I could be proved totally wrong. It depends on how they’ve done it and who they’ve got to do it. If they’ve spent fifty k on overlays, then it might well have happened. But if you’re doing it properly and you put any money, resources, time, effort into it, it’s going to have a positive impact on your ROI.

Grant Bather:

Yeah. If organizations haven’t already got it on their radar, there isn’t as good a time as now, I guess.

Johny Cassidy:

Yeah, I would say there’s no wrong time to do it. The right time is now, but there’s no wrong time to do it. It takes commitment. And if your C-suite needs sat down and convinced of it, maybe they’re not ready yet. They’re not on the journey; they don’t have that experience. There’s a lot of people that have never come across disabled people or think that they haven’t. So if it’s not on your radar, if it’s not on your horizon, if it’s not in your lived experience, then I don’t think people can be blamed for not doing it. But that can only go so far when legislation like the European Accessibility Act is coming in. How many times do people have to be told, “This is what you have to do,” before they actually act?

Grant Bather:

Yeah, it should be in their diaries. They’ve got a countdown now; they’ve got something they have to meet. So it gives them that incentive to do it. And then, as we’ve said, it will surely kind of lead them to wake up and go actually look at all these new customers, these new solutions and these new things we’re doing, these new people that we’re reaching with our message, and we are being authentic with it. Like you said, as long as the money is spent in the right way, then it can only be seen as a good thing.

Johny Cassidy:

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s really worth pointing out as well, and I keep saying it, that it’s not just disabled people that you’re going to impact and benefit because there are different types of disability, isn’t there? You have someone who’s permanently disabled, like a wheelchair user through an accident, or like someone who’s blind. But you’ve got situational. So you might have someone who’s nursing their baby and they’re trying to use the website or they’re trying to use the phone, or you might have someone with a broken arm, or you might have someone who just had a cataract operation or something like that. If you make your website easier to use for people who are permanently disabled, you’re going to help those with temporary ones. And then there’s situational. Maybe you’re on a train and it’s really loud.

Johny Cassidy:

You need subtitles because the video that you’re trying to access, you can’t hear it because it’s dead loud. Or you’re looking at your phone and the screen is really bright. It’s a contrast brilliant on it, or the sun’s shining on your screen and you can’t make your screen out. It’s a contrast really good because you’re doing it for people who’ve got colorblindness. We call it the curb-cutting effect. When you do good for a certain group of people, it benefits everybody. And it’s that thing again. Captions, subtitles—so many young people use subtitles now. When you’ve got the TV on, like, my children have it, and they don’t need it. But it was really good to help people read, people that don’t have maybe English as their first language, and they can’t understand accents or something.

If a drama is on, all these things that are done for the benefit of one group of people have that knock-on impact on benefiting other people.

Grant Bather:

Absolutely, yeah. And you see it, to go to the LinkedIn example you gave, videos on LinkedIn. Most of them now have got the subtitles. You see it on a load of other social media platforms as well, websites. Most of it is automatically with that transcript, which all helps. As you said, it’s not going to be seen as a hindrance to reaching out to people. One thing I did want to ask is AI coming more into focus? Can you see AI being used more to reach these audiences as well? Absolutely.

Johny Cassidy:

I’m really excited about AI, generative AI in particular. I think it’s brilliant. I’ve got various apps that I use every single day now that they’re proprietary ChatGPT, but they’ve got different user interfaces on them. I think the caveat of that would be that we’re still in the foothills of what it can do. And I’m a journalist, so if I was thinking, right, okay, we could use automated generative AI captions, for example, you would still need to make sure that you have got human editorial oversight in that. The same would go for alt text. I can use apps now to generate proper alt text and give me a really good description of what an image is, what a complex image is, what a bar or graph or a map or infographic is showing. But you do still need to be careful.

They’re talking in the AI world about something called hallucinations, where things are produced that might not actually be the truth at all. And there’s a massive risk. If we’re talking about risk, there’s a huge risk there of missing disinformation and spreading false narratives. If something isn’t got that human editorial oversight, it always should have. But alt text is something that a lot of people that need to be creating it sometimes find quite tricky to describe an image. If you can use generative AI to help you describe that image, and then you look at it, have that editorial sign-off point, then why not use it? It’s really exciting.

Grant Bather:

Yeah. Like you said, it’s just in its infancy, and I’m sure new use cases are coming out every single day from a PR and communications perspective. I’m seeing it from my side every day. But like you, with that guardrail of remember the misinformation, disinformation, make sure all the data is appropriate and relevant. And going back over it, I think it’s the human plus AI. It’s not AI on its own, because that will go off in its own way and may misinterpret or misdirect. So it’s about finding the guardrails for it. But as you said. Yeah, very much in its infancy, I think, as well.

Sorry, Grant. With that, it’s important to point out about the potential for bias and inbuilt bias. There has been a lot of rubbish that’s been published, and if we’re looking at large language models like OpenAI, they’re only taken from what has already been published. So if we think about it as rubbish in, rubbish out, understand those caveats that there is going to be a lot of bias, people will have read about the potential for racist output or sexist output, or the technology is just scraping what exists. I think absolutely, the Guardrail is a really good way to put it.

Grant Bather:

Yeah, it’s going to be a really interesting space, one that we’re watching at Rostrum really closely to see where the solutions are, where the potential pinch points are, where the threats, and the opportunities are. I’m sure each and every organization, regardless of sector, is looking at it. I’m sure BBC is putting a lot of resources into AI as well. I only have one more question that I typically ask guests before we sign off on the podcast. But before then, is there anything else before I go on to my last question that we haven’t covered today that you think is really important around crisis, around the 2025 legislation, or the purple pound?

Johny Cassidy:

I think it’s really just worth underlining, again, authenticity. If a business is going to do it, make sure that you do it right. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the resources to do it all in one go. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing it incrementally, tiny steps. As long as you’re doing it positively and you’re doing it authentically, then it’s a win. It’s a win for you as a business, but it’s also a win for your customers, and it just makes things better for everybody. So I would say don’t be afraid to ask people, don’t be afraid to reach out. That hashtag #a11y is really good and there are going to be people that can help and direct you on your way.

Grant Bather:

And I’m pretty sure that’s answered the last question that I typically ask, which is what advice would you give to organizations or individuals to help mitigate and minimize their exposure to reputational events? And I think you said it there. It’s basically find the experts and find the communities and talk to them.

Johny Cassidy:

It is. And again, it’s Sherry Byrne-Haber’s accessibility isn’t a problem to be fixed. It is a culture to be built. And if you can ingrain that, embed that through all the different strata of your organization, large or small, it’s going to be a benefit for everyone.

Grant Bather:

That is a fantastic way to end the podcast. What I really like is it’s definitely an opportunity for organizations if they haven’t started. Think about it already. The best day was yesterday. The second-best day is today. So yeah, looking forward to hopefully having you back on the podcast in a few months’ time to talk about this in some more detail. But for now, thank you very much for your time.

Johny Cassidy:

Thank you, Grant. Thank you. My pleasure.