Neil Milliken: As organizations start to realize that they have to do this, because what you'll get is contractual flow through. So lots of large companies are saying, well, we don't sell direct to the market, therefore it's not in scope, but their customers do. And so their customers are now embedding these requirements into all of their sort of RFIs and RFPs.

So it's going to to change the, the market view as a whole.

Tom Arbuthnot: Hi, welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we are going deep on accessibility. There's a new European accessibility Act coming through, and it has big implication for organizations. We talk to Neil Milliken, who looks after accessibility at atos, and he talks to both the internal audience of atos and customers around meeting those requirements.

Really interesting conversation with Neil. Many thanks for him joining. Also, many thanks to Jabra who sponsored this podcast. Really appreciate all their support of Empowering.Cloud. On with the show. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Excited to have a conversation this week. It's a little bit different from some of the other conversations we have.

We're gonna get deep into accessibility and there's, uh, some compelling events happening actually around accessibility and the European Accessibility Act, which we'll be getting into. Um, but firstly, uh, Neil, welcome to the pod. Do you wanna just introduce yourself? Yeah. Thank you very much, Tom. 

Neil Milliken: Uh, I'm Neil Milliken.

I'm the Global head of accessibility for Atos Group. We're a French headquartered, multinational, uh, digital transformation organization. Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And you've been there for quite a few years. Um, I think initially more on the consulting side and then coming into this accessibility role, what does, what does that even mean to start off with because that'd be great to understand.

Neil Milliken: Uh, so yeah, I've been actually in the accessibility and assistive tech game for 25 years now, uh, came in to support assistive technology, uh, on one of our client accounts. And then, uh, started expanding the remit for accessibility. Because if you have assistive technology, it needs to work with everything else like the mainstream technologies, and that's where accessibility really comes into play.

Um, and so now I'm responsible for. Policy, uh, the programs, all of the sort of work we do around compliance, uh, employee enablement, um, from a disability inclusion point of view, um, and, and then also developing our portfolio. Um. And, um, so that's the accessibility portfolio of services that we offer to support, uh, end users and, and, and, and employees with disabilities and disability related needs, assistive technology support, et cetera.

And, and then all of the sort of external work that we, we, we do as well. So it's, it is, um, it's a role that's pretty wide and varied and really, you know, you never get bored. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And you have your own, uh, podcast you do on this topic as well. 

Neil Milliken: Yeah, that's been running for, we're in our 11th year, so we've over 500 episodes of AXS Chat.

That's a AXS Chat If you wanna find us on all of the, uh, usual channels, um, wide ranging, bunch of topics around sort of inclusion, technology, et cetera. So, um, really love a podcast. So when I was asked to come and join you on this one, I seized it with both hands. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So it feels like, um, accessibility and assisted tech is having a bit of a moment with the AI stuff coming in because suddenly, and, and I guess.

It's got wider in definition. Like I use, for example, subtitles on Netflix just 'cause I find it easier to process, but I wouldn't say. I, I needed it, but yet I choose to use it. And it feels a bit like that in the enterprise as well, with translation and subtitles and accessibility in products. Is that, am I kind of on the mark there with it having more of a more focus than it has before?

Neil Milliken: Uh, well, it, it's certainly getting used a lot more. So there's more and more accessibility features and assistive features being built into mainstream products. So, um, yes, you're seeing captions. Yes. You're seeing, uh, yeah. Personalization. Um, but what I would say is that people with disabilities and, and users of assistive tech have been using these features for a very long time.

Um, so, um, when I first started I was looking at speech recognition systems and you know, I've been shouting at computers for the last two and a half decades. It's only in the last five years or so that they started answering me back in a way that's quite sensible. And, um, really there are only a handful of user groups that.

Persevered with what was quite a clunky technology. Um, it was judges. In the judiciary and doctors and and so on in the medical profession and people with disabilities. And, and each one of those three groups had a, a valid reason for wanting to persevere with something, uh, the doctors and the judges because it made them more efficient because they were used to dictating anyway.

And therefore the, the sort of load of training a system, which you used to have to do. Wasn't that bad for them and people with disabilities because it enabled them to do stuff that they either found very difficult. Like me being dyslexic, writing stuff was hard. Uh, it was much easier to talk, um, or even impossible.

So if you had mobility issues, might find it almost impossible to navigate your computer using a mouse or a keyboard, but you could do it by voice. So, um, these technologies. That are assistive, um, have really been a foundation of, of sort of modern technology stack that we're now using today. Sort of the large language models, natural language processing, all of these kind of things have sort of definitely having a moment in, in the way that we are now starting to interact.

And they sort of underpin things like chat GPT and, and Copilot, et cetera. So, um, what you are seeing is people taking these things that were niche. Into mainstream technology. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's, it's amazing. Like I use, uh, voice a lot, uh, with, um, chat gpt and it's, it's imminently coming to M365 Copilot as well.

Just, um, as you said, it's sometimes easier, for example, for me to kind of verbalize a prompt and I might go, uh. Back and forward, left and right of my conversation and, and now we're at a point with the AI tech where it can take that and make sense of it. So like, it's, it, it's good for everybody, not just the people that actually need it.

And I'm guessing because of that, it gets more support, it gets better and better and gets used more. 

Neil Milliken: Yeah, absolutely. The wider the, the usage is the more like, the more mainstream it is, the more likely that there is to be investment in this stuff. Credit to the mainstream tech companies. The, the Apples, the Googles, the Microsofts of this world.

They've been investing anyway and they've been investing for years. Um, and, and so there are an awful lot of features out there. And as you said, there's an awful lot of people that wouldn't consider themselves to be disabled, that are, are using those features. Now, some of them are for convenience sites.

Dark mode, like, uh, dictation, right? And there's a generational comfort level with dictating that Generation Z are very much more comfortable dictating into their phones than maybe calling a human. Um, so I think that that. That, that's a shift. But you also, I think there's an awful lot of people with disabilities that wouldn't consider themselves to be disabled, or they have what we would say is age-related degradation of function.

We're both wearing our glasses here, so at certain point things got too blurry for us to be able to continue without them. Um, and this is where what you find is that people are starting increasing their font size and, and using some of these features. Whilst they wouldn't consider themselves to have a disability, these become.

Helpful and, and almost essential for people. And so what you see is that there's a much wider user base than you would initially expect. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. I'm in the, uh, the big iPhone, big font size camp as well as I'll admit to that. 

Neil Milliken: Yeah. So, so they're definitely there. And, and then if you're thinking about it, um, from a quality point of view, right then, then, uh, and I, I spent my first.

Few years working with speech recognition systems. Sound in was incredibly important for the, the quality of the recognition, and you used to have to train it as well. Now you don't have to train it, but sound in is still really important and it's really important not just for sort of one-to-one dictation, but also for supporting all of those features that we're all starting to love.

Uh, in collaboration tools. So, you know, the fact that you can get a transcript of your meeting, um, the, the more better quality the sound in the, the better the quality of the recognition, the more accurate those meeting notes are going to be. So, um, so this is something that we. We are now starting to see it, um, the desire to have good quality audio equipment, having an impact on, um, not just the quality for assistive tech users, but overall productivity.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know you've been using a lot of the Jabra tech and obviously they have the hearing a division and tech in their world, and they kind of bring some of that smarts over to their enterprise stuff. And there's two things there. One is the. Good quality audio input. The other one that's interesting is the, uh, kind of looking after your ears scenario of, like you mentioned, our glasses.

Like glasses are super common. I feel like we haven't got to the same level with like assistive hearing tech, but it feels like it's on the way because it's like becoming more mainstream to have that conversation now, or I think it is. Is that, is that fair Again? So, so, so I think there's. 

Neil Milliken: Definitely, you know, I, it's highly visible, right?

Uh, you're wearing glasses, it's obvious that you, you need some vision correction. Um, a a lot of the time people that maybe don't hear so well don't do anything about it. Um, and that's quite common. Yeah. Um, and then also they hide the hearing aids and people cover them up with hair and all the rest of it.

What I do think has happened with, um. With the proliferation of captions everywhere is that it's becoming more of a mainstream conversation and people are asking to have captions turned on, et cetera, and I also think that the fact that. Um, we are spending more and more time with headphones on, on audio and stuff like that is making people think more about their hearing.

Uh, whereas when you were face-to-face, you were able to sort of infer maybe, uh, some. Uh, sentiment, meaning it's harder to do that when you are in, in 2D, um, and it's harder to do that if you don't hear well. Um, so, so yeah, again, you want to, to have clarity of sound, but there's also features. In, you know, high end audio, particularly the Jabra ones where you can have stuff that, that it does a sort of test of your ears and tries to match the sound levels, uh, to the, the acoustics of your ears.

Now, um, you can go one step further. You can actually, you know, Bluetooth connect your hearing aids to, uh, to your phone and to your other devices. So you could directly join a Teams call with, uh, audio streamed directly to your hearing aid. Um, so. So I think that these, these technologies are starting to get in integrated into the mainstream tech stack.

And what you're also seeing is the sort of blurring of the boundaries between, you know, medicalized hearing tech. Yeah. Which is what GN, the parent company of Jabba are doing. And, and, and some of the other hearing aid companies like Siemens, et cetera, um, and mainstream. Um. Tech, which is now starting to, or you know, sort of augment hearing as well.

So, you know, Apple have, uh, you know, included in their, uh, sort of iterations with the ear pods and so on, uh, the ability to start using them as not quite hearing aids, but support hearing. Yeah. And, and so I think that we are seeing that mainstream of hearing tech. It's, it is lagging behind. Uh, vision, uh, and I think vision has been a lot of one of the key drivers around accessibility and assistive tech for decades.

If you look at sort of the, the, a lot of the sort of accessibility criteria that you have to meet in order to meet the laws mm-hmm. A lot of 'em are around tech for people with low or no vision. I mean, there are others. But, but there's a significant amount about how, how screen readers work and how, you know, the other technologies work.

So, uh, I think that this is changing as, as technologies sort of catch up with people's needs 

Tom Arbuthnot: and with, with headset choices in, in the enterprise. I know you work internally and externally. Mm-hmm. Are you seeing that come up in like, vendor selection criteria and considerations? Like, is it, is it part of the conversation?

Neil Milliken: Uh. So, so it depends on clients. Some clients are, are more focused on this than others. Some take a view, we want the best of everything. Mm-hmm. For everyone. Um, they tend to be in sectors that have plenty of money. Um, I think that we're clients have to be more cash conscious then they're thinking about.

What's suitable for the sort of everyone, and then you buy, uh, specific devices for specific need types and we always, when we're. Thinking about assistive tech. We have a series of devices and softwares that we provide for, for customers depending on their need. And, and so those needs are going to be different.

So certainly if you're in an open plan office and you are, uh, easily distractable, I am, I'm dyslexic and ADHD and lots of the autistic community also find noise and distraction and issue, then, you know, big noise canceling headphones, um, are going to be, you know, of help to you in that noisy environment.

You know, they're not gonna get rid of everything. Um, but they're gonna be of, of some level of support. And I used to sit in an open plan office next to the. The sort of sort of kitchen area and like two hours of the morning at lunchtime, I'd be a total wreck because there was a bean to cup coffee machine there and it'd be grinding all the beans and making screeching noises for a couple of hours and that completely destroys your flow.

Now something like these won't completely fix that, but it helps. Yeah. Um, and then sort of white noise helps. So you can have various different white noise apps. There's like one in the Jabra app. Uh, another one that's favorite of mine is. Something called My noise, which, which allows you to generate all sorts of things that help block out those sounds and give you flow.

So, so I think that, you know, it's, it has to be horses for courses. You wouldn't. Necessarily want to have these on eight, 10 hours a day. Yeah. And I'm at home right now in my home office. I prefer to have a desktop microphone and to be able to sort of move around and hear the rest of the world around me.

Tom Arbuthnot: I guess that's where portfolio comes in, isn't it? Yeah. It's like different like personal wear style preferences. Like that's interesting. 'cause same thing I have. Uh, big over ears. I wear in the office sometimes when I'm focusing, but I usually use on ears during the day because I don't want an over ear all day necessarily.

Neil Milliken: Yeah. And, and then if I'm traveling, I'll, I'll take buds. Yeah. Um, and, and they're, they're sort of portable, so I think, again, we are, we're always looking to the context of how someone's working and the context of their disability. And, and actually when we think about disability, we often talk about. Um, there being three essential types of disability.

You can have a permanent disability 'cause you're born with it and it's never gonna go away. You could have a temporary disability, um, because maybe you've had an accident. So you could be born with a congenital limb, uh, difference, or you could fall out of a tree or play rugby and end up hurting your arm.

Or you could be situationally disabled because carrying shopping and, and essentially you, the way that you would interact with technology is going to be the same. Doesn't matter whether you are shopping or have a temporary or permanent disability, you're still only going to use one, you know, one hand instead of two.

Yeah. But you know, or for, for another example, if you are driving. You're actually going to completely change the way that you interact. You know, you sh shouldn't be using your eyes. You sh should not be using your hands. And so really you're having to sort of interact by hearing a voice. Yeah. And so those then actually bring into play some of the accessibility features.

And again, um, you know, being able to isolate the sounds and so on, uh, is really useful. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And, and there's a compelling thing happening at the moment, which is the European Accessibility Act. I know it's fairly intricate, but can you kind of take us through what the impact of that is? Because I know you're working through it at the moment.

Neil Milliken: Yeah, absolutely, there's, um, it's a major piece of legislation 'cause it's the first time that is really impacted private sector as well as public sector. So there's always been a lot of focus on citizen services from governments and so on. So looking at website accessibility and so on, because you're providing the system and you don't have consumer choice.

Whereas here, this focuses on a wide range of products. It's not everything, but it's a wide range of products, including computers, operating systems, mobile devices, banking, uh, systems and retail systems, et cetera. And it's private sector as well as public sector. And the member states of the European Union have to pass this into their own national laws and set up.

Monitoring agencies to enforce this. And whilst there's been an awful lot of laws around disability inclusion and accessibility, there hasn't been that much in the way of enforcement, apart from in America, where they go down the route of suing companies and, and, and, and so they litigate their way to accessibility, whereas this is, this is really what's called a market access directive.

So if you are selling the, the products and services that are in scope. Then you are required to meet the European standards for that. And that's the EN 3 0 1 5 4 9 just trips off the tongue. Uh, and, and that really, um, focuses on, on making sure that the products and the services are accessible and it goes in even into things like packaging and instruction manuals.

Um, and if you don't meet that standard, then you don't qualify for a CE certificate. And CE certificate is your conformity system. Certificate that allows you to sell in the European market? Yeah, so you and I are in the uk. We've brexited, whoop, um, but it still impacts us because if we want to provide a service to.

EU citizens, then we have to make sure that that service conforms with the European Accessibility Act and, and so it's almost like a GDPR moment. Yeah. For accessibility. The difference being that GDPR was a regulation and everything was the same in every single country, whereas here the countries have had to, put in

their own localized legislation, which will create a little bit of extra complexity. 

Tom Arbuthnot: But this is, uh, like as you said, it sell into, which usually 'cause the European Union is such a massive commercial influence, if an organization has to meet the standard for there, they'll just meet the same standard for everybody.

They'll be got a different, typically a different software or a different version of the headset. Or a different packaging. Exactly. So it raises the standard across the board, hopefully. 

Neil Milliken: Yeah, I think it's gonna have a, a long-term positive impact on accessibility across the board. Now, um, I don't think there's been anywhere near as much publicity about the EA as there was about GDPR, um, and read into that what you will.

But I think that as it starts to embed and as organizations start to realize that they have to do this, because what you'll get is contractual flow through. So lots of large companies are saying, well, we don't sell direct to the market, therefore it's not in scope, but their customers do. And so their customers are now embedding these requirements into, um, all of their sort of RFIs and RFPs.

Yeah. So it's going to, to change the, the market view as a whole, and people are going to. Yeah, eventually be forced through market pressure to, um, take and, and improve the, the usability and the accessibility of the, the products that they're selling and, and that will have a sort of halo effect out, across, across markets beyond Europe.

Tom Arbuthnot: Another big players like Microsoft, obviously we talk mostly about on the podcast. They're obviously aware this is coming in and changing. Like, uh, are they mostly on it? Is there work to be done? What's your thoughts on Oh, yeah. 

Neil Milliken: So yes, they've been, they've been on it for a long time. So if you look at any of the, the Microsoft products, you know, um, they will have a, what's called an accessibility conformance report, and that will tell you.

How well it conforms with the different accessibility standards. Um, and, you know, they take it really seriously as an awful lot of documentation, et cetera. Now, in a world of continuous product development, things change a lot. And, and so sometimes the accessibility lags, but um, or. You add in new complexities when you change the user interfaces.

Um, that's certainly a cognitive accessibility issue for someone like me. Um, now the, the interface may be technically accessible, but the fact that it's changed and I don't recognize where anything is, has an impact. So, um. So, yeah, those, those large organizations generally have a, you know, an infrastructure and a setup where they've been having to supply into government for a long time.

So it's been a requirement for government. So they're already documenting this stuff, right. But, but so they're, they're just extending what they do, um, to, to take into account the consumer. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And for people who are listening to this podcast, who it might be the first time they've heard about the European Accessibility Act, like who, who does that sit with inside a typical organization and what should they do to start to get their head around the implications?

Neil Milliken: Yeah, I, I think large organizations will either have some people that are doing, uh, CSR or compliance. Um, so there will be probably some, uh, function there or, or if they have an accessibility function, then, then sure. I think where it becomes more difficult is when you're a smaller organization that's making products and software that.

It probably sits with the management team to begin with until they, um, can work out whose responsibility it's going to be to, to take this on. Now there's technical requirements, but, but there needs to be someone as a sort of an executive owner for that. And, you know, in our organization, I'm, I'm that person.

But for smaller organizations, you, you know, you're wearing multiple hats. Yeah. And so it's probably someone on the management team that's already responsible for, uh, maybe health and safety. Maybe it's compliance, but, and it varies within different organizations because different organizations have different makeups, so there's no one right place to put it.

And, 

Tom Arbuthnot: and that's a, a, a spec they can presumably look online and it's documented that there'll be lots on there. 

Neil Milliken: Uh, in terms of the role, maybe, maybe not. I mean, there's the,

Tom Arbuthnot: sorry. No, just like the, the, the acts like how they could

Neil Milliken: Yeah. The acts there. The, there's. Clarity in terms of the standard and so on.

Um, uh, there's lots of consultancies out there hyping up that you need to comply right now. Um, I think that we need to take a measured view on that, especially if you've got thousands of products, you can, let's not panic about it, but we need to take a measured approach, but mm-hmm. But yes, there, there's guidance out there.

There's some really useful, um, guidance from things like the. IAAP, that's the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. There's some, some nice videos on, on what you need to be thinking about, what you need to be doing. Uh, there's, yeah, there's quite a lot of free stuff out there that, that can help you inform you, um, and, uh, a lot of the stuff in terms of the standards and everything else.

Yeah. There's again, there's free check, there's free sort of plugins and so on. Now they will only get you so far in terms of checking the accessibility, and they're mainly focused on. Websites. Mm-hmm. And not other products, but there's, there's certainly some starting points. Um, and, and they will start flagging issues.

And, and quite often, you know, you have systemic issues. One of the most common is actually, um, driven by the marketing departments of organizations in that they choose branding. Oh, branding and style guide. The colour contrast isn't so good, you know, so at, at the moment, if I lean over. You can see that my name disappears into the background of my wall, but if I, uh, if I lean the other way, then you can see, you know, it's got a decent enough color contrast and you can read it and, and that's actually one of the biggest accessibility issues out there is just legibility.

Yeah. And that's a transversal issue because if you can't read it, you can't see it, then you're not getting your message across when people can't use your product. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, um, and maybe we will, uh, go back and forth and we can add some links to the podcast to give people some links to starter for ten on that.

Um, Neil, thanks so much for taking the time to explain all of that. It's a really interesting time and, uh, appreciate the perspective on how it impacts not just a subset of people, but kind of everybody on some, some range and, uh, and. That actually now with this new act, it's really have to get a bit of focus as well.

Neil Milliken: Yeah, they are. Thank you for having me. It's, uh, it's always a pleasure to come and bring the conversation to different areas of technology and business. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And if you wanna catch your podcast again, give us the link again. 

Neil Milliken: Yes, it's www.axschat.com. That's axschat.com. Awesome. Thanks so much, Neil.

Thank you.