Mike Gifford: Accessibility, Sustainability, and Content Management – Episode 201

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Where web accessibility, digital sustainability, content management, open-source software, and web standards intersect, you’ll find Mike Gifford.

Mike is the open standards and practices lead at Civic Actions, a company that helps governments deliver better digital services.

Through his practice, Mike ensures that the content systems they deliver are built as sustainably as possible, deliver accessible experiences to citizens, and work well for authors and others who use the system.

We talked about:

• his role as open standards and practices lead at Civic Actions
• his professional practices in accessibility, sustainability, and content management
• the similarites and differences between accessibility and sustainability work
• his work in a W3C community group working on sustainability guidelines
• his passion about the impact of his work on humanity and the planet
• one of the key connections between sustainable and accessible efforts: people’s lack of interest in potentially distressing topics
• ATAG 2.0 authoring tool accessibility guidelines and how content management systems can better serve authors
• how to improve the working relationship between content authors and content systemts engineers
• use cases and examples of benefits of sustainable and accessible practices
• ways that content authors can get involved in CMS and other content-management conversations
• how “hard” practices like finance and IT tend to get more clout in organizational decision making
• the inability of automated accessibility testing tools to fully assess the usability of experiences
• the persistent ongoing need for both accessibility and sustainability work

Mike’s bio

Mike Gifford is CivicActions’ Open Standards & Practices Lead and a thought leader on open government, as well as digital accessibility and sustainability. He has worked with governments in North America and Europe, and spoken internationally. He is also a W3C Invited Expert and recognized authoring tool accessibility expert.

Mike has served for two years on the board of the Digital Services Coalition. In his last year he served as president of the board where he helped better define what it was to be a digital agency. In this role, he met with leaders in government and the private sector who are working for modern digital government.

Previously, he was the Founder and President of OpenConcept Consulting Inc., a web development agency specializing in building open source solutions for the open web. OpenConcept was an impact driven company and Certified B Corporation. Like CivicActions, OpenConcept worked extensively with the Drupal Content Management System .

Mike has spearheaded accessibility improvements in Drupal since 2008, and has served as a Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer in 2012.

As a long-term environmentalist, Mike has found ways to integrate his passions for the web and the planet. He is an active participant in both the W3C’s Web Sustainability Community Group and in the ACT-IAC Climate Change Community of Interest.

Connect with Mike online

• LinkedIn
• Drupal
• GitHub

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)
• Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG)
• Sustainable Web Design
• Website Carbon Calculator
• Ecograder
• Accessibility Insights
• Web Almanac: Accessibility
• Web Almanac: Sustainability
• WAVE Browser Extensions
• Axe
• Google Lighthouse

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 201. The content we publish on the web needs to be accessible to anyone and everyone who might need it. It’s also becoming clear that we could be doing more to mitigate the environmental impact of our online products. Mike Gifford works at the intersection of web accessibility, digital sustainability, and content management. Whether he’s participating in a web standards group or configuring a CMS, he’s always looking out for content, people, and the planet.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 201 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really delighted today to welcome to the show Mike Gifford. Mike is the open standards and practices lead at Civic Actions, a nonprofit that works on mostly government and other public sector institutions with their technology stuff. So welcome Mike. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.

Mike:
Hi Larry. First of all, I just have just say that Civic Actions, although we are an impact oriented company, we are still a company, we’re not a nonprofit. But I was hired to start with Civic Actions, looking primarily at accessibility and wanting to help improve their accessibility practice area, because that was an area that Civic Actions realized that we needed to improve on. And in that time, because I was also very involved in the Drupal community, I’m a Drupal accessibility core maintainer, I became involved in looking at the open source angles as well. And so we’ve sort of modified the position so that it’s a open standards and practices leads so that again, I can look at ways that we can improve how we deliver quality to our clients. And accessibility is a big part of that and open source and that transparency that comes with open source is a big part of that.

Mike:
But I’ve always been an environmentalist, and so sustainability is something that’s always been dear to my heart. And I realized that there was a real connection between our digital worlds and the environment and that our digital world was having a big impact. And it was a lot more than just not printing paper, not printing copies of your websites or your emails, that the cloud is just somebody else’s computer. So began looking at sustainability and how we can look at building better practices around that and have contributed to a number of pieces, whether it’s the sustainable web manifesto or looking at information like the WC3 community group for web sustainability guidelines, like an effort to try and take the web content accessibility guidelines and convert that into something that is around digital sustainability. So, I’ve been looking at all of those elements and Open is a great way to go off to blend them together.

Larry:
That’s interesting because we talked in Montreal at a conference a couple of months ago and I was drawn, and the reason I wanted to have you on the show is because of the connections between accessibility and sustainability. But we didn’t mention specifically your emphasis on the open standard stuff because I’m big on the open web, the old semantic web and love standards-based initiatives of any kind. So that’s really cool that those three things now intersect. It turns out I’m getting a bonus topic to talk about as well.

Mike:
That’s right.

Larry:
Yeah. But can you tell me a little bit back to our original conversation about the sustainability and accessibility? I think most of my listeners, I think all of my listeners are going to be attuned to both topics. And I love the fact that you’re in a role where they overlap. Can you talk about how they come together in your work?

Mike:
I think that there are a lot of similarities in that these are things that just like with, well, accessibility and performance are generally things that are thought of at the end of a release cycle. It’s not something that you think about. Most teams are not thinking about that while they’re developing it. They should be because it will save them time and money if they do, but they don’t. So that’s one area where there’s a commonality. Performance and sustainability have a lot of similarities. There’s differences, but there’s very similar goals in that if you have a more performant website, generally it’s also more sustainable. There are some caveats to that, but that’s something that essentially if you’re using less computational power, then it is using, it’s a more sustainable website. So that was sort of one of the commonalities.

Mike:
Another area is that both accessibility and sustainability are things that everyone wants, but nobody wants to pay for. So it’s generally something that requires some level of either internal leadership or it requires legislation to make it important enough for organizations to act on. So part of the reason we’re trying to go off and develop the web sustainability guidelines is because we believe that this is a path that governments might be looking at to try and reduce their environmental footprint. If there’s a set of guidelines that they can point people to and start to build legislation around, then it can be very much like section 508 or built into standards like EN 301 549, which is the standard that Europe is using to try and look at their digital accessibility within the web accessibility directive and also the European Accessibility Act. So those are some ways that there’s commonalities.

Mike:
There’s also sort of, there’s levels of … Both of them are hard to measure in a purely technical way. They do require some level of user interaction or user engagement to actually understand how effective they are. There’s no automated testing that will cover all of the WCAG criteria. You can get a good third of the way by using automated testing, but that’s as far as you can go. And it is very similar with digital sustainability in that there’s just a lot of variances, whether it’s your power grid or the devices you’re using or the type of site that you’re engaging with, the type of technology, the type of hardware, you can’t necessarily know in absolute terms what the carbon impact is. So dealing with that ambiguity is something that, again, has a similar challenge between accessibility and sustainability.

Larry:
Nice. I think most of my listeners are going to be familiar with the WCAG guidelines, but I’m curious about the web sustainability guidelines. Is that a work in progress? Is it like a W3C thing? Or is … Tell me more about the sustainability work.

Mike:
It is definitely a WC3 thing, but it started by a community group that Tim Frick was leading, and is still leading. Tim Frick and Alex Howard have been doing some wonderful work to try and to draft and organize these guidelines over the last two years. And there’s quite a lot of information available there that is still sort of provided by the community group. But in order to become a WC3 standard, the group actually needs to move from being a community group to being an interest group or a working group. And right now we’re on the path of becoming an interest group for the WC3, at which point we’ll be able to create something that has the weight of the web content accessibility guidelines.

Larry:
That’s great. I’ll link to that. If you can… I’ll talk after but I’d love to get a link to if folks, because it sounds like the kind of thing that many of my folks might want to become involved with as well, or at least follow.

Mike:
That’s great.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s …

Mike:
We’ve also tried to learn. The team that’s putting this together, particularly Tim and Alex and others, have tried to learn from the failures of WCAG. So there’s a website for example, that makes it easier to read it. You can get the standards in a standard format that look just like the WCAG guidelines and will put you to sleep in no problem. But there’s also a nice site that breaks it down into different sections and makes it easier to engage with it. So they’ve set up the standard in a JSON format so that it’s more easily consumable by other websites, and easier for people to go off and to learn from build on. So that’s one of the advantages of this approach.

Larry:
Interesting. I love that everybody notices that inherent tragic irony of the content accessibility guidelines not being the most readable document on the planet, but it sounds like you’re working on it, and that’s really, I could geek out forever on the JSON format for the underlying thing, but I want to turn back to the rationale for this work. In the case of accessibility, I remember making this case to a marketing guy like 25 years ago on a website I was working on. Like, dude, you wouldn’t turn away 20% of your users at Walmart. They don’t have a guy there holding the door for people who can’t do everything you need to do in the store. So I think making the case for accessibility, although I still find people having to make that case. So there’s that, and then there’s the practical implementation part, which WCAG can guide people through. But I’m really curious about sustainability in particular, the rationale. Is there an analogous thing to the accessibility rationale for sustainability?

Mike:
Well, I was giving a presentation at a big open source event in Brussels earlier in the year. It was called FOSDEM. And I went to two sessions. They’re all about AI, and the room was just completely packed. And then I was going to give a presentation on accessibility and sustainability, a joint conversation much like this. And the room, it didn’t exactly empty out, but it was certainly a lot emptier. And I was like, I got a bit grumpy because here we are, we’re talking about people and the planet that we live on that we require in order to live. A hundred percent of us, even those in space are dependent on this planet for their life. And so there’s really nothing more important than accessibility and sustainability because it is about people, a people like all of us, and the planet we live on.

Mike:
And it is 25% of people that have permanent disabilities. But there’s also people who have temporary and situational disabilities. Like Larry, you’ve got glasses. If you lose your glasses or misplace your glasses, how easy is it to read your phone? Probably really difficult. I mean, I’ve got situational disabilities in that in the morning, my eyes are a little bit fuzzier, so I have more trouble reading in the morning than I do shortly after that. So by the time I’ve had my first coffee, it’s all good, but before that it might be a little bit blurry. So I think a lot of people are like this, and as we grow older, these disabilities pop up more and more, but there’s so much stigma associated with disability that people don’t want to think about it. They don’t want to think about the limitations of their abilities, and we don’t want to think about the limitations of our planet, and especially in a digital age, we’ve been sold the idea of abundance, that we do not need to think about about the limitations or scarcity, but we do because we do live on a finite planet.

Mike:
And there may be at some point in the distant future that we’re able to go off and escape the bounds of our beautiful world and escape into a Star Trek future that has limitless energy. But that’s nowhere near where we are now. There’s nothing that would give us the impression that we will ever see this time in our lifetimes. So we need to try and think about the realities that we are going to be faced with.

Larry:
Especially regarding sustainability, that myth of abundance. I remember reading almost 30 years ago, the book Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, where he talked about this, making the transition from atoms to bits or from atoms to bits. And thinking like, oh, good, okay, done with the physical world. We’re just off here with all these things. But then if you’ve ever read Gerry McGovern’s book, Worldwide Waste, the first sentence in that book is, “Digital is physical.” So it’s come back around. So that notion … So there’s so much we could talk about that, especially now with the explosion of AI that’s really come to the fore. But I guess in terms of day-to-day design, content strategy and information architecture practices, what are kind of little things we can be doing down at this level to have an impact on sustainability?

Mike:
I think that I mentioned earlier this authoring tool accessibility guidelines. So for accessibility, this is a really useful and highly underused standard. So this is another WC3 standard. The ATAG 2.0 guidelines have been in place for a while. And Drupal has tried to implement them, and several other systems have tried to implement them as well, but there’s not a lot of general demand for them. But this is broken up into two parts. The first part is how do we make the interface accessible? And the second part is how do we make sure that the interface is more sustainable? Sorry, how do we make interface? How do we make sure that the content that is … The other challenge about accessibility and sustainability, if you’re talking about the two, it’s easy to get them mixed up because they have enough syllables and there’s enough similarities between accessibility and sustainability that they’re easily confused.]

Mike:
But authors need help in creating accessible content, and that’s something that’s often overlooked. And so ATAG is a way to go off and to help that happen. Sustainability is very similar. How do we try and make sure that the interfaces that authors use is light and easy for people to use, and that is performant so that they don’t have to wait a long time for the interface to load? But on the same side, how do we make sure that authors are able to think about those best practices, whether that’s optimizing images by default so that they don’t have to think about the image size or trying to make it more difficult to go off and add in JavaScript? Because JavaScript is a very powerful tool, but it’s also very resource intensive.

Mike:
So if you’re exporting all of this additional JavaScript to a client to be executed every time the page loads, that’s something that is going to have a very large environmental impact because again, it’ll be loaded millions of times and executed millions of times in a non-performance environment. Like most client desktops are not designed to be performant whereas if you’re dealing with the server on the cloud, I mean, that’s a highly optimized device. And so you’re going to have a much lower impact for stuff for the same process that’s executed in the cloud versus that’s being executed on a personal laptop that people have set up. So yeah, thinking about those types of things.

Larry:
No, and I’m really curious again now about the ATAG, the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. Is it both about the use of the tool and the content engineers and others building the tools? That’s what it sounded like. Do you build it in a way that it promotes those things you just talked about, like the image optimization? Or how do you get people to use less JavaScript? Because web developers love using JavaScript.

Mike:
It’s true. I think it’s partly about getting the engineers engaged with the authors and helping and seeing this as a big puzzle that we all need to work on together as opposed to, there’s an engineering piece and then there’s an authoring piece and they’ll work it out. But I think that we need to have more cooperation and collaboration so that engineers are able to understand the needs of authors and understand those goals of trying to build an optimized performance sustainable website. That’s something that they’re going to be measured against. And if they’re not measured against that, and if the actions of the author are not considered as part of that evaluation, then you’re not going to have a very meaningful measurement, because the website, the technology is only useful if you add content to it. The great thing about content management systems is they require content.

Mike:
And so yeah, you can build a great interface that is accessible and sustainable, but if you haven’t thought about how users are going to enter that content and what their knowledge is and what their needs are, then the end result is not going to be as slick and efficient and effective as it needs to be. And a lot of times, both accessibility and sustainability are really, it is about building better quality. Everyone benefits if you have an accessible website. Everyone benefits if you have a sustainable website. Nobody likes to see pages load. And we’re all in situations where we’re on our phones, we’ve got limited connectivity. And maybe we’re outside and the sun is shining and we can’t see our phone as well, because there’s not enough control over the light. Or maybe we have low bandwidth because again, we are on a mobile phone, we’re in either away from the city or into the city, and that there’s not a good signal where we happen to be. This happens to us all the time. This isn’t a rare occurrence, and yet we act like it is.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s right. Always designing for the optimal situation. I want to go back just a little bit. I just love it whenever I see an opportunity for more conversations between content people and engineering people. And this seems like a particularly germane one. And we’ve talked, I can’t remember, there were back-to-back conferences in Montreal, so I might be conflating things here, but Lo Etheridge was at one of them. And Lo is a DevRel representative at HyGraph. I think they may have moved on. But anyhow, it’s really common for CMS providers and other tech companies to have a DevRel kind of role. And often it’s like multiple people on a team. They’re just reaching out to developers all the time, selling them on why that technology is so great. There’s rarely-

Mike:
Right.

Larry:
The reason I mentioned Lo is that Lowe is one of the few people in that world who’s equally concerned with the authors … I guess given that there’s an imbalance on the supply side of these content management systems. And I don’t know how it is in the Drupal world, it’s been 10 years since I spent much time there. But I’m curious about how content people, if we don’t have internal representation in the industry, how can content people better represent their needs, like the authoring needs and other needs that might fall by the wayside as the vendors are talking to the engineers?

Mike:
I mean, that’s an interesting challenge because in many places, even the design teams are not necessarily as engaged, particularly if you’re looking at open source tools. Many open source tools are built more for developers and engineers than they are for designers, even though you need to have the designers to go off and to help implement the projects effectively. But again, thinking about the content people is really key as well because they’re the ones that are creating the content. I think that this is one area that WordPress has done a particularly good job in that all of their WordCamps are very much structured around users who are creating content with WordPress, whereas Drupal tends to be more focused on the technology and the engineering is possible with Drupal. There’s other get togethers and events as well, but often it’s tied around the… The only one that I know of that’s really focused around the content has been the WordCamps historically.

Mike:
And I think that’s partly because there was more stuff that could be done with the blogging platform, and there were people who were excited about the content and creating the content, and that was the fun part. Whereas I think that with a lot of the open source technologies, it’s more about what you can do with the technology than what you can do with the content. But yeah, I think that ultimately there’s ways for content authors to get involved, whether that’s looking at documentation or whether that’s looking at the issue cues and user stories.

Mike:
There should be more role for content strategists to think about that. And there’s going to be more discussion around elements like navigational elements within Drupal. How do we manage the admin menu so that it makes sense? How do we try and position and organize the content of the admin side that it’s structured? And also how do we give our teams the flexibility that they need to create interesting content with the tools that we’re giving them by default to make that introduction for content authors easier? But it is an interesting area that does need more work, I think, for all content management systems.

Larry:
Again, and it’s not just content and engineering, like you mentioned. I think there’s also design. Even IT often has an inordinate influence, because they’re the ones with the budget to buy the stuff.

Mike:
That’s right.

Larry:
So it’s not just the engineers, it’s also the IT administration people and folks like that.

Mike:
Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s really interesting that I’m expanding my thinking even just as we talk here, because I come from that content representation part, and I’m realizing both it’s a little more addressable because of the things you’re setting out, but I’m like, “Oh man, more people to talk to,” which for me as a podcast host is never a problem. But yeah, it’s interesting.

Mike:
It’s interesting in organizations. I think that the hard science, the hard sciences are generally taken more seriously and given more clout, have more budget. So whether that’s the finance, in an organization, finance is ultimately the ones that say yes or no to a lot of what goes on. And then closely associated to that is the IT team who again, you’re dealing with hard infrastructure or hard technology. Not that it is necessarily harder than the content, but it is something that it’s seen as being just like the physical sciences versus the social sciences, it’s not that one is harder than the other, but one is given more credibility or clout in our social structure.

Larry:
Yeah, I often talk, I call them foundational skills, not soft skills. And one thing, it’s like soft skills are really hard. All the communication stuff and just all the… because it’s mostly about people and people are less amenable to guidance than computers are.

Mike:
Yeah, I mean, technology is easy compared to people. People are, there’s so many varieties, so many needs, so many expectations. Technology doesn’t have any of that.

Larry:
Right. How does that manifest in your work, the people part of it? I love that you’re involved with the committees, working on the new guidance and stuff, but in your day to day, you do a lot of client work at Civic Actions as well. How do you work both of your internal team and with clients and others you’re involved with? Tell me a little bit about the people part of representing accessibility and sustainability in content systems.

Mike:
I can speak more about accessibility on this, and part of it is looking at automated testing is probably the closest to the hard sciences. How do you create an automated test that you can use using something like Accessibility Insights or the Wave toolbar or Axe from Deque, and provide a report of the known accessibility errors that are part of a page or a website. And that’s been an area that has been a real problem for the last decade, trying to go off and to create tools that can provide reliable and reports of errors that avoid false positives. And I think we’re in a good place now to go off and to cover about a third of the issues. But there’s a bunch of issues that are never going to be caught by these automated tools because content and structures and websites are too difficult to go off to catch all of the exceptions and all of the implementations, at least as HTML is right now.

Mike:
But there’s been some interesting directives around user testing and user testing with people with disabilities. So if we can do that user research and the user testing with users with disabilities, you get to have a whole different sense of what the problems are and what is your definition of success. And that can be done both before the product is actually being built, but also after it’s being implemented. And the European Union does some great work on consistently implementing accessibility statements and making accessibility statements part of the Web Accessibility Directive. And the UK, when it was part of the European Union, produced some great resources in English, which really are models which organizations around the world should use if they’re looking to get feedback from people with disabilities to help them improve the accessibility of their website.

Mike:
I think of both the standards, but as well as these tools, these automated testing tools. As basically being maps, maps to create a good user experience for people. But the terrain is people’s experiences. What are they seeing when they’re engaging with the site? So reminding people that the map is not the terrain or ceci n’est pas une pipe, this is not a pipe. That idea that you have, they’re useful, you can identify this as a model, but it is not the same as reality.

Mike:
So how do we use that model to make it easier but not confuse the model for reality? And that’s the thing that we need to build with accessibility. And the same thing is going to need to be done with sustainability as well. But we’re right now just building out the maps for those best practices. And we have some tools that help to try and identify the page loads. Things like websitecarbon.com and Ecograder are great tools, but so for that matter is Google’s Lighthouse. So the Google Lighthouse scores are quite a useful measure to go off and to evaluate where there’s room for improvement within your web pages.

Larry:
I might hit you after this to get links to some of those, but I’ll try to list all those resources you mentioned, because this is the kind of episode that’s going to send people scrambling for resources. So I’ll make sure I include those in the show notes.

Larry:
Hey Mike, I can’t believe it. We’re coming up close to time already. But before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything you want to revisit from the conversation or just make sure we share before we wrap up?

Mike:
I think going back to one of the commonalities, I think that with both of these issues, and in fact with security as well, we have to be thinking about this as a journey, not a destination, that there’s always room for improvement. You’re never going to be able to go off and to check that box and say, your website is accessible enough, or your site is sustainable enough, or your site is secure enough. There’s always room for improvement. Because you’re building on the internet, there are always changes. And for that matter, for both accessibility and sustainability, we’re dealing with people and people, their demands are changing. So you can run into, if you have a board member that has particular needs that are not satisfied by the WCAG requirements, you might need to make some changes in order so that that board member can engage with your website for instance. And there’s definitely other situations like that where we need to be open to learning and open to pushing ourselves to build better quality products and make sure that we’re thinking about people and the planet as we do that.

Larry:
I love that. And the necessity of building this in is operationalizing it essentially, and just always being aware of it. Well, thanks so much. Oh, hey, one very last thing, Mike. If folks want to connect or follow you online, what’s the best place to find you?

Mike:
The best place to find me is on LinkedIn at the moment. That’s where I’m most active, and it’s just MGifford on LinkedIn. There’s a few other Mike Giffords, but at this point, I’m the only one looking at accessibility that I’m aware of. So that’s – and Drupal. So MGifford is where I’m most commonly found in most social media.

Larry:
Excellent. I’ll link to that in the show notes as well to make sure folks get it right.

Mike:
Wonderful.

Larry:
Well, thank you so much, Mike. Really excellent conversation.

Mike:
Thank you. It was great.