#TakeFiveWith Richard Morton

Could you tell us about yourself and your job role? And one hobby/fun fact?

My role is interim Head of Accessibility for Government at the Government Digital Service (GDS). What that means is I support the Cross-Government Accessibility Community, which is made up of about 1,100 people who are interested in accessibility. I encourage the community to use online channels and events to collaborate, and support them in solving the problems we face from an accessibility point of view.

The GDS accessibility team is very small. So, we can provide expertise but we can not support the whole of government by ourselves. This means we want to try and raise as much awareness as possible.

I’m also responsible for building capability across central government by working with departments like HM Revenue & Customs and The Department for Work and Pensions. I build capability in teams through things like training, guidance and general support.

More recently I’ve been involved in raising awareness of the new online accessibility regulations across the whole of the public sector, through events and running accessibility empathy lab workshops. I’m also working with the team within GDS that is going to be monitoring the accessibility regulations and making sure that public sector organisations comply.

My fun fact is that I enjoy music performance – such as playing the piano and singing. I went to Paris with a church choir back in 2000 and we managed to sing Latin Mass in the Notre Dame Cathedral, which was a good highlight.       

What is a typical day like for you?

There isn’t really a typical day; I do lots of different things and lots of multitasking. There is some structure to my days but generally I work in quite a reactive way because I respond to enquiries that come in by email, Slack and so on. I also plan for talks and events, and I regularly run visit to GDS’s accessibility empathy lab.

Could you tell us how you got into your role?

I have worked in IT for my entire career and I got into accessibility by accident. I was doing some freelance work testing the browser compatibility of a website against specifications, and was asked to do some accessibility testing. I had to learn about accessibility quickly so I’m pretty much self-taught. Over the past 14 years I have built up more specialist knowledge and I’m still learning all the time. You never stop learning in this role!

Accessibility is a specialised subject and one of the things I’m trying to do is make sure everyone understands that we’re all responsible. Even within specialist roles there are parts of accessibility and inclusion that individuals need to be aware of. So, my focus is not to make the role of an accessibility specialist redundant but I am hoping there won’t need to be too many around in the future.

It’s all about embedding knowledge and understanding into everyone’s roles within digital services so accessibility is not treated as an afterthought. This happens a lot, even where accessibility is taken seriously, people often still think about it at the end of a project or have an accessibility tester come in and test the final product. This is not the right way to go about it. In the agile world of development, you need to incorporate accessibility throughout the process.

What motivates you to do a good job?

I think it’s knowing that everything we do, and try to do, is to improve the capability of citizens to interact with things more independently. Every improvement we make increases the number of people who can access services by themselves, without having to phone a support helpline or get face-to-face support. We know some people cannot use the web, but for those that can, we want to make it as accessible as possible.

It’s about improving things within organisations as well. There are just as many people with disabilities in employment and we need to make sure everything is accessible for them. So everything we do to improve internal services helps people do their job, improves their efficiency and improves the whole organisation.

I always tell people that if you can help someone to use a particular service independently, it encourages them to do other things independently too. If someone can fill in their tax return form online easily, regardless of their own access needs, then they could be more capable of dealing with other things like council tax reports, for example.

How do you learn at work?

I tend to pick up things through discussions in emails, Slack and newsletters that are shared internally and by listening to people at events. I try and keep up to date through articles, blog posts and so on, but I tend not to do so much in the way of formal learning. There’s so much stuff out there now and lots of free resources, so most of what I learn is self-taught. I learned how to use assistive technologies myself and I think that’s just my own particular learning style. Training courses can be useful and I do go on them, but I tend to find I learn best by seeing people doing things and learning from them directly.

What are your aims for the next year? For example, if you work in accessibility do you have any plans to help make workplaces more inclusive? If you work in Learning and Development, how are you going to promote workplace learning?

One of the things I do is raise awareness of accessibility regulations. I need to do more of this over the next year because after the September 2020 deadline, public sector websites need to be compliant.

A big thing I’ve taken on is trying to tackle the PDF mountain. Central government and local government produce thousands of PDFs every month, most of which are not designed from an accessibility point of view. I want to reach a point where everyone across government knows they should only publish PDFs when they absolutely have to. I also want people to know how they can make the PDFs they do publish more accessible.

I want to build awareness and a culture around accessibility. A lot of inaccessibility happens because of attitudes, such as ‘we’ve always published PDFs, let’s carry on doing it’. People don’t like change and I understand that, but there are certainly problems with people accessing PDFs and the file format itself is hard to make accessible. Usually it’s easier to convert PDFs to HTML or another format than to try and make them accessible.

My goal is to establish a culture where everyone is responsible for accessibility. I want accessibility to be taken as seriously as security and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – all those things people seem to be aware of these days. There’s still a limited understanding of accessibility and how we need to make things work for everyone, but we’re getting there.

YOU CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT THE GDS TEAM ON THE FOLLOWING PLATFORMS:

GDS website: www.gds.blog.gov.uk

GDS twitter account: @GDSTeam

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