Digital accessibility work is changing fast as AI coding tools become more common, but better automation does not always mean better outcomes. In this episode of Accessibility Craft, Amber and Steve talk with Skyler Young and David Botos from Connect 211 about what it takes to make complex public-service platforms accessible, how human-reviewed accessibility audits can make AI remediation more effective, and why thoughtful developer workflows still matter.
Everyone also tastes Athletic Brewing’s Ripe Pursuit Radler, a bright, lemon-forward non-alcoholic drink that sparks a surprisingly deep beverage discussion about beer, soda, mocktails, and post-exercise refreshment.
Episode Outline
- Meet Skyler Young and David Botos from Connect 211
- Learn what 211 services are and why accessible public resource directories matter
- Explore the difference between noisy automated accessibility reports and actionable human-reviewed audits
- Walk through a practical workflow for turning audit findings into AI-assisted pull requests
- Compare AI coding tools like Claude, Cursor, Codex, and other model-assisted development workflows
- Talk about where AI helps developers move faster and where human judgment is still essential
- Understand how accessibility improvements can also reveal deeper code quality and maintainability issues
- Get practical advice for developers working toward WCAG and Section 508 compliance
Links & Resources Mentioned
Tune in to Accessibility Craft conversation episodes like this one every other Monday.
Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible through their work.
To learn more about us, you can visit our website.
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Transcript
Chris Hinds: Welcome to Accessibility Craft, where we explore the complex challenges and emerging trends that are shaping digital accessibility, while sipping on unique craft beverages. This show is proudly produced by Equalize Digital, The most trusted name in WordPress accessibility. Join us every week as we break down accessibility news and share the expert strategies we’ve used to help make millions of websites more accessible.
Grab a drink, the show starts now!
Amber: Hey everyone, it’s Amber, and I am here today with Steve.
Steve Jones: Hello, everyone.
Introducing Special Guests Skyler and David with Connect211
Amber: And we have two special guests, Skyler and David. Introduce yourselves so people know who’s joining us here on the podcast today.
Skyler Young: Okay, yeah. Skyler Young, CEO at Connect 211 uh, David.
David Botos: Yeah. And I’m David. I handle most of the product stuff at Connect 211.
Amber: Awesome. And we are gonna dive more into what Connect 211 is in just a little bit. But for folks listening, this is episode number 164 of Accessibility Craft, which means you can find show notes and a full transcript if you go to AccessibilityCraft.com/164. Of course, we start every episode with a beverage.
We don’t have Chris here today.
Steve kindly offered to do our beverage intro.
Today’s Beverage
Amber: What are we drinking today, Steve?
Steve Jones: Yeah. So today we are drinking Ripe Pursuit Radler, and I think Skyler’s going to clue us in here in a minute on what exactly a radler is. But, it’s by Athletic brewing. Ripe Pursuit is delicious proof that the juice is always worth the squeeze. It’s a lemon infused, radler style brew with a moderate wheat base and a hint of cane sugar. That being said, what exactly is a radler?
Skyler Young: It’s like a lemon- lemonade meets, a lager, typically. I was introduced to these while I was taking the Camino from Portugal into Spain. We walked about 160 miles. This one is really interesting. The key thing I noticed when drinking it was that little bit they said about hazy. It’s a little unusual for a Radler. It’s almost like it’s got just a hint of effervescent hops, which is really refreshing actually. It’s pretty tasty in this case.
Amber: So we will call out that you’re not supposed to drink before, but it was so good Skyler could not resist. So that’s the…
Skyler Young: I… might have.
Amber: … Preview for folks. He definitely… You definitely give it the thumbs up rating then.
Skyler Young: Oh yeah. Oh, yeah, Oh, yeah. If you’ve been out working in the yard on a hot summer day this is gonna be what you love afterwards.
Steve Jones: All right.
Amber: And David, you had suggested, Athletic Brewing Co., which for folks who are not familiar, I think it’s worth mentioning that this is non-alcoholic beer that we’re gonna drink. today. So it’s zero proof. I have never tried them, a couple years ago maybe at this point, I had listened to a How I Built It episode where they talk about if you’re into marketing and, like, how businesses grow, like how this brand came to be.
But you drink a lot of Athletic, David?
David Botos: I, you know, I, I don’t drink too much. Um, I’m not, I guess, fully against drinking for special events, but I think that’s a thing with people in my generation. We just drink a little less. To say that I mean, my first non-alcoholic beer was, like, Heineken Zero, and I’m like, “This is crap,” right? Pardon my French.
But um, since having that had this, and especially their… I think it’s a Mexican Copper or something like that. It tastes just like a Modelo. And I’m like, I love Modelo, so I I… That’s kind of what I drink. Yeah.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Skyler Young: That’s awesome.
Amber: I am excited to try it.
Steve Jones: All right.
Amber: Cute little can design, very yellow and springy. And like you were saying, got the hills on the road and… Although this has a bicycler on it.
Skyler Young: Yeah.
Amber: Yeah
Steve Jones: Let’s crack ’em open.
Amber: All right, let’s do it.
David Botos: That was a very crisp sound.
Amber: I did bring a glass. Because I…
Skyler Young: oh, so good.
Amber: … always like to see the color.
Steve Jones: A nice Accessibility Craft glass you got there.
Amber: Craft pint glass.
David Botos: Yeah.
Amber: It’s kind of the color of a Blue Moon or something, I feel like. What it makes…
Skyler Young: Yeah.
Amber: … me think of.
David Botos: And, you know, what is really impressive about Athletic? For a non-alcoholic beer, you usually don’t get a head like that. I watched a review going through of this guy pouring and showing. You don’t get ahead like that almost non-alcoholic beer.
Amber: So this is, it’s three quarters of an inch or something of foam. they do something different?
David Botos: I wish I knew. It sounds like Chris would’ve probably known.
Steve Jones: They put a little bit….
Of…
Amber: Maybe.
Steve Jones: Yeah, they put a little bit of soap in there.
Amber: It doesn’t taste like soap.
David Botos: I would say it is more kind of akin to a soda. I would say that the Mexican Copper that Athletic has, I feel like if you have never drank non-alcoholic beer, if you drink that, then you’ll be like, “Wow, this really is strikingly similar to a Modelo.” It’s pretty good.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: So you think this tastes more soda like than beer like to you, David?
David Botos: I think it’s that cane sugar, right? I mean it’s good, it’s refreshing but yeah, this is a little uncharacteristic for the other Athletics that I’ve had, I would say.
Steve Jones: Is that because it leans more on the suite than the than the bitter side?
David Botos: I would say so. I mean, in general, just as a non drinker, I would say that me and my girlfriend will do mocktails and stuff like that, and what we find is that actually a lot of the sweetness exists in a cocktail to kind of cover up the alcohol.
Uh, so when the alcohol is gone, what you really kind of want is something a little bit more kinda like ginger beer, kind of got a little bit of a punch to it. So yeah, I mean, if you want more zero alcohol drinks, then yeah, we’ve been doing the research.
Amber: So what would you recommend over this one then? Is it that other one that you’re talking about or do you have a favorite of Athletics beyond that?
David Botos: Yeah. I only found them more recently, so I wish that I knew a little bit more. I’ve tried their light beer. That tastes like a Miller Light. Every way that a Miller Light tastes like a Miller Light, right?
Steve Jones: Looks like they got some sours in here too, like a raspberry sour, a mango sour. Those look good.
David Botos: I’m not as much of an IPA guy. I dunno about you guys, but…
Amber: I think for me probably needs more hops which is weird ’cause I also. People who listen all the time will know that Steve and I both don’t super like IPAs because they’re, like, too hoppy and too… But I feel like I, I do think it’s more beer than soda flavor to me. Got a lot of lemon which is not necessarily bad, but I think it overpowers a little bit.
Skyler Young: Yeah…
David Botos: Yeah.
Skyler Young: I agree with that.
Amber: Like, it- that’s a little too subtle to me.
David Botos: I’m with you on that. I didn’t have really the right language to talk about it, but the lemon is very forward.
Steve Jones: Yes.
Skyler Young: The, uh…
Steve Jones: Yes, very-
Skyler Young: … so radlers Spain and Portugal definitely were a lot more grainy.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Skyler Young: Lot more grain in the ratio to lemon.
Amber: So, Skyler gives it a thumbs up. What about you, Steve?
Skyler Young: Yes.
Steve Jones: So am I evaluating it as a beer or am I evaluating it as a drink, right? As a beer, I think you’re right. When you open it at, on the nose, it was like… I was like, “Oh, this is, smells like beer.” Kind of strong, but it dissipates really quick. And there’s something captured in the can, but from a beer, yeah, I think it needs a little more hoppy, a little more of that beer kind of bitterness would help. But if I remove that and just say, am I evaluating this as a drink? I would say that as a drink, it’s extremely pleasant drink and tastes great.
Amber: You one thumbs up or two?
Steve Jones: I’d give it two thumbs up. It’s good. It’s a good drink.
Amber: Yeah. Yeah. What about you, David?
David Botos: I would say that it’s like what you’re saying, Steve. It’s is it a drink or is it a beer, right? I think as a drink, especially like Skyler’s saying, you doing some yard work or something and you need something refreshing, I feel like I’d rather reach for this because sometimes alcohol will gimme a headache Glitter in the day. But like I, I have to say that as a drink, and a half. As a beer, it’s a five, right?
Amber: I will be continuing to drink this one, so that’s good.
Skyler Young: Yeah.
What is Connect 211?
Amber: Of course, we brought you here to talk about more than cool craft beverages Uh, as fun as that part of Accessibility Craft is. Can you give us a little bit more background on what is Connect 211?
Skyler Young: Yeah. Connect 211, is the brainchild of a director of Washington two one one. That’s a statewide call center for non-emergency help. So there are roughly two hundred forty two one one call centers federated across the United States and the Commonwealth nations. And they run these call centers.
So if you’re in an emergency, you call 9 1 1, But if it’s a non-emergency need, like I can’t afford my rent this month, or I’m having a hard time affording food, or where’s the nearest shelter? That would be something you call 2 1 1 for. A lot of folks don’t know it exists unless they live on the streets, and then you definitely know about 2 1 1.
These call centers, some of them have existed since the sixties, they uh, have curated these very highly informational directories of the help in communities they serve that’s pretty much unrivaled anywhere. They were like, “We should probably make this available to the public on the internet.”
We came in and started building that, you know, as the short story. It’s now deployed across 20 states as a statewide directory system. We’re processing, by the looks of it, about a half million search queries per day right now. And like in Washington State, we’re hitting about a hundred thousand unique users per month, is kind of impressive for a state with 8 million people in it.
So what we do. And obviously, accessibility is very top of mind when we’re trying to serve the public and serve vulnerable populations in need. So yeah, that’s how we got kind of connected here.
Amber: Well, I think you answered my next question, which is what made you decide to focus deeper on accessibility? So I think let’s pause for a quick commercial break, and then we’ll come back, and I bet Steve has a question about a. what this actually look like, focusing on accessibility.
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Welcome back.
The Value of Human Audits and Feedback in the AI Age
Steve Jones: So let’s dive into your workflow and some of the lessons you’ve learned from remediating that might help others going through the same process. You went through an accessibility audit, and you received an accessibility report.
When you received that report , what did you do to prioritize those issues, and did anything stand out? Anything surprise you from the audit?
Skyler Young: I mean, I’ll give a high level, and David will definitely give us some details and some also really gnarly feedback on how to use AI with this. But it, it happened that I’m also an a part owner of a sister website company, and so we’re maintaining these highly technical directories, but also websites for a bunch of state entities in Maryland, for example. And 508 compliance, right, is just now coming down from governance saying, “If you are a government funded or representing entity, then your online presence has to be held to much higher standard of accessibility.” I mean, minimum WCAG 2.2. And so we’ve been through that process with different accessibility systems on a bunch of different web properties, and it’s been very painful. It’s been very painful. Uh, I find that a lot of, oh, the solutions we’ve had to work with are using, I think, AI to just fire hose thousands of overlapping pieces of feedback at us on what needs to be fixed or done, and it just hasn’t been very helpful, Gonna be honest with you. Not the best use of AI that I’ve seen.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: So like the audit reports that you’ve gotten, you think were generated with AI.
Skyler Young: They’re just a nightmare. There’s no way a human made so many thousands of rows of just mush. The descriptions aren’t very good. The code highlighting is not very good. The suggestions are not very helpful. So by contrast we received this report from your team, and, it had like what, 137 rows. Really clear feedback. Really clear, easy to understand.
Our engineers looked at it were just like, “I immediately know what they’re talking about, and I have a pretty good idea of what to do.” Then on top of that, for the half dozen things where we were like, “We really don’t know what to do,” we gotta talk with you about it, and you gave us clear feedback on that. We brainstormed it together.
I can’t even tell you how night and day this experience was.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Skyler Young: It’s the first time we’d actually enjoyed the process of dealing with accessibility, you know, on someone else’s terms. We always have our own internal processes, but this was the first time we’ve worked with an outside report and we’re like, “I feel like this actually improved our life.” That was my experience of this. And then…
Amber: Wow, I’m so… I appreciate you saying that. I’m so glad.
Skyler Young: I mean, you just caught us at the moment, right? I mean, we literally just did a bunch of reports for other stuff, and it was just pretty awful. And this one, we were just like I kind of like this, actually. Top of that, it was useful enough to actually have AI be helpful on our side as engineers, and I’ll let David talk a little more about that.
David Botos: Yeah. Something I’ll just say is that with any AI coding process, um, context management is pretty much king above all else, right? And I would say that having a report which is essentially deduplicated, cuts out the noise. I mean, I’ve tried a couple of online Chrome based detectors to try to assist my process, and once I started kind of comparing what I was getting as signals here versus what I was getting in the report. Just to be specific from an engineering perspective, is there are certain things that a detector will trip and say, “Hey, this is an error.” And the thing is once you actually kind of dig into it and you research it, you realize it’s not actually an error, right?
So I don’t know what tools you got your your team on, but– or if it’s humans just with actual discernment, the report being good means that the context going into any AI coding tool is going to be a lot better. I would say that if you were to break it into a workflow. First being, detecting the actual accessibility issues. Next being, you know, dealing with those and figuring out intelligent changes. I would say that AI seems like it can maybe help with dealing with the intelligent changes, but potentially due to the flexible nature of the types of things we try to achieve with web apps it seems like a human verified audit is a good first place to start.
Amber: Yeah, just background for folks, we audited the Minnesota version of Connect 211. For the state of Minnesota. Specifically, I think it, it focuses more on their ADA resources, which of course you really want that website to be accessible. Um, and yes, it was, it’s like a combination of doing some automated tools, but you always have to have a person look at it, and you have to use real screen readers if you really want accessibility.
And I will say we have a big push here that we don’t like to provide generic recommendations. And I think probably, you know, we spend a lot more time, which maybe means we’re not as profitable as some of those other accessibility companies out there. But I do feel like ultimately that is a much better result. Um, I mean, I hate to hear of someone getting a report and being like, “I can’t even do anything with this.”
Steve Jones: Right.
Amber: So …
David Botos: I think that you guys will find as AI coding continues to be more and more popular just based on my experience implementing, right? Just because of the context that I get to have with that report is so much better. That you will notice that there will always be a segment of customers who say, “Hey, you know, I just need it as cheap as possible.”
They don’t really care, I suppose, about their engineering team. But If the engineering team has a say in where money gets spent, then probably this would be a good place to invest some money.
Skyler Young: As a business owner, I can never turn my product brain off. And this was a VPAT certification process that we’re going through. So this carries a price tag with it compared to some of the free tools, although not as big of a difference as you would think.
Some of the automated reports we got were costing 10 to $25,000 per year. And I mean, it was just not that helpful. But in this case, you know, it’s a pretty hefty price tag because we do have real people creating these reports. But that’s a much more justifiable price tag from my point of view as an engineering team. If I get this value of way better context for AI tooling. It radically decreased the cost of development to remediate these issues for us. That’s an interesting kind of maybe benefit of saying instead of getting the cheaper AI driven or automated solution, it’s worth it to pay for humans in the loop because this is gonna save a ton of engineering time.
Using AI for Accessibility Remediation the Right Way
Steve Jones: Yeah. I wanna lean in on the context piece of this a little bit. So we actually, on our team, we would do remediations as well, but we typically stick to remediations in the WordPress space. And you alluded to this a little bit, David, where when you get that report back, right you have to go through this process of, one, evaluating if that information in that report is correct in the first place, right?
And what in the report lends itself better to the context of the AI than in, in the more automated reports that you’re receiving? Is there something in particular you’re seeing there?
David Botos: Let me think about that for a second.
Steve Jones: Sure.
David Botos: I, I think it might be helpful if I share the process that I took to get from report to PRs.
Steve Jones: Y- Yes. Yes, very much.
David Botos: So, I was able to take the report, and it’s a short enough report that if I download it as a CSV, basically, then I can basically put it into my code base. And now if I’m using my coding agent, which would then have all of our agentic skills and documentation that we hold in our repo to make this sort of things easier, it now has full code context, and it also has, uh, the skills that we use to develop on a day-to-day basis.
Now what it can do is it can essentially work with that CSV using a script, so it can pull rows, it can create its own CSVs. And the first step I did was basically say, “Hey, let’s trace these back to their origin points as components and figure out which issues are touching the same components.”
Because PRs need to be split up based on the code components, whereas the compiled code will make two things seem separate that are actually combined, right? So that was basically the the first approach I would say is basically going in and saying, “Hey, act as a product manager, right? Split this into, with code context, as many PRs as is needed to basically split up the work so that no parallel agents step on each other’s toes.
Whether or not you parallelize the work, which we did for speed, um, I would say that the first result is never going to be what you want it to be. I also told the first cut to basically, ignore any changes that might imply more difficult architectural changes. So the first pass through was handling more of the ARIA tags, stuff like that, that won’t impact functionality.
Then kind of with a more fine tooth comb, we had one final PR at the end that went through and handled more of the changes that might impact functionality. Um, on the other end of that process, we also have a very talented person on our team, named Kylie. She acts to help with client communications, but she also just whips the engineering team into shape and make sure that the staging environment doesn’t look like a mess. And so…
Skyler Young: She’s a tester.
David Botos: Yeah, yeah. Among other things, right? And, she’s been really effective on that as well, which is, she’s by no means a trained accessibility expert, but she can say, “Hey, numbskull, this broke something.” Um, and I can be like, “Oh, shoot.”
So, I’d say having any AI driven coding process be bookended by human approvals, and human stewarded context is a good general rule that I’m seeing. Um, but that was the general flow.
What AI Models Work Best for Accessibility Remediation?
Amber: I am curious, are you using Claude or what are you using that you found has worked the best for generating PRs that require the least human correction?
David Botos: Yeah.
Skyler Young: All of them.
David Botos: Yeah. I mean, generally speaking, this has actually been an internal discussion we’re having because Claude is so expensive, right?
The reality is that Claude is brilliant when you got a lot of responsibilities, because when you’re balancing a lot of responsibilities, you feel like it’s a little more fire and forget.
That’s not saying that I didn’t have to go through and manually review each PR, but it gets us on the right track, right? I would say that I’ve been more impressed with Claude for coding. I would say that it takes more effort, it’s more effortful to pick the right model for the job. But obviously the cost benefit is really due to whether or not you’re Microsoft with deep pockets or if you’re, you know a small startup that’s serving nonprofits really.
Amber: The rest of us.
Skyler Young: I’ll throw a plug out there for Cursor. I’ve been very impressed with their ability to have a much, much cheaper model that’s faster and operates at almost, I’d say about like 80 to 90% of the effectiveness of Frontier from OpenAI, or Claude.
David Botos: Cursor’s Composer model, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but it’s just a fine tuned Kimmi K-2. Or Kimmi K-2-5. So it it is really interesting also, complete sidebar, but, I was fine tuning an LLM and most of the good models that you can fine tune based off of are Chinese models. And, uh, every once in a while when you’re in the fine tuning process, it will just start speaking Chinese…
Steve Jones: Yeah. Yeah.
David Botos: [ Cross Talk ] tokens.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
David Botos: I was just like– I was saying to my friends, I’m like, “Man, I’m having to train my model to not be Chinese.” I’m like, “This feels bad.”
Steve Jones: Yeah, we’ve run into that when running old Llama and stuff, running stuff locally to try to, you know, save some of those precious tokens. So you talked a little bit about like running parallel agents. Are you doing that through Cursor are you running like a squad of some sort or like a Claude bot, things like that?
David Botos: Yeah. I would say to be honest with all of the different companies, and this is good for, I guess, the rest of us, uh, speaking royally, right? These AI coding models and, uh, the people running them are essentially in a race to the bottom in terms of price. I don’t care if it’s Cursor, I don’t care if it’s Codex, I don’t care if it’s Claude Code. The power of the underlying model matters, but ultimately, as soon as somebody releases a, uh, a nice AI coding feature, you’re gonna find that every other company is gonna have their own version of it within a week.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
David Botos: So it, it really doesn’t matter. Um, in my opinion, the thing that should be more of a thing that we talk about as a community, maybe I’m just not running in the right circles or following the right forums or whatever, is what is the lowest, like, performance and then cost per token, right? Like, I just need that, like, all the time, you know?
Musings on WordPress, Enterprise Software, and Doing Accessibility Right Using AI
Steve Jones: Yeah, totally. So, the remediation process, I’ll speak from my perspective, and, and this is coming from, like, the WordPress world. Our remediations a lot of times are wrapped in stacks that we haven’t chosen and that come with what the client has. So it could be WordPress with a page builder. It could be WordPress with, you know, a custom theme or whatever. And when you’re using dependencies that are built by other people that you necessarily can’t make direct modifications to. And from the AI front, you know, WordPress is not quite there where you could hook a MCP up to it and get, like, a lot of good results at this point. You kind of can locally a little bit.
These are client websites, and we wanna be very careful not to do that on production websites. What I’m kind of leading towards here is, sure, the AI is helping all of us move a lot faster and be more efficient and, and things like that, but there are breakdowns, right? There are times where, the AI just doesn’t quite get there. Like, we have to remediate. We have to actually write a JavaScript patch for something that we can’t edit because it’s a, it’s a third party plugin of sorts. Now, with your product in your stack, I’m assuming that you have a lot more, of control over that.
Did you run into issues where the AI is not there, and you have to kind of step in as the human, or there’s appropriate places to step in as the human? Could you speak to that a little bit?
David Botos: I mean, my experience was, when we’re taking the first crack at a PR, my general understanding is that, basically, if you are brain off just letting an AI coding agent just go and you’re just merging those PRs without any human review, what you’re gonna…
Skyler Young: Be terrible.
David Botos: …accumulate a bunch of garbage, which will end up making that AI coding model eventually, at some point, fail.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
David Botos: This pipe dream about, you know, the single person billion dollar company that like AI, you know, pundits like to throw around because it essentially promotes their business interests is, first of all, not desirable. How lonely is that? Jesus. But second of all is also, it’s impossible, right?
I mean, you can get to somewhere where it feels like you’re getting a lot done, but there needs to be a better institutional understanding of real velocity versus like, not all movement is velocity. Your speed isn’t velocity, right?
Steve Jones: Right.
David Botos: I find that a lot of people are posting online being like, “Look at my AI coding agents. I’m doing so much.” And like, effectively they’re doing like this…
Steve Jones: Yeah.
David Botos: Like, “Wow, you’re going 200 miles spinning in circles.”
There’s no real direction. Uh, they’re not actually building something that will, be able to…
Skyler Young: No.
David Botos: … support growth, basically.
Amber: We’ve talked about this a lot in the WordPress space because there’s been this huge increase in people submitting plugins to WordPress.org, plugin repository, and they can tell that it’s a big increase in AI coded plugins.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: And, and we’ve gotten to the point where anything, especially if it’s created or new in the last couple years, like I won’t put it on any website. I’m like, “Steve, go look at this.”
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: Because I don’t… It’s like just because they had an AI agent helped them create it over a weekend, that’s like a proof of concept. That is not something you want on a production website, and you don’t know, like have they tested it on all of the different types of hosting environments? Have they tested on something that has thousands of pieces of content? Probably not.
Steve Jones: What AI has done is lowered the barrier of entry, right? And it’s done just that. It’s lowered the barrier of entry. So more people can enter, but it didn’t lower the barrier to enterprise software. Like, we still have to create enterprise software, and we can do it with the aid of AI and like you said, the velocity and things like that.
And what we’ve noticed on our team is that, you know, that scope of that feature is the same, but the velocity that we move within, uh, steps or milestones of that feature are different now with AI, right? We can get probably 80, 90% of the way there way faster. But the actual 10 to 15 is actually taking us a lot longer than it used to because we are then coming in as the human reviewers at that point and saying, “Wait, hold on. This is not right. We gotta fix this.” So…
Skyler Young: So that’s gonna be particularly hard for WordPress because WordPress does tend to be so ad hoc by nature. Everything is different. I mean, I, I am seeing permanent velocity increases with AI pipelines and more automation when you’re iterating on the same process or product and, like, improving it.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Skyler Young: You know, that’s definitely a step change in the ability to make AI more useful, I think. But it’s also mostly only an enterprise scenario. So In the meantime, AI has definitely made me a lot more productive, but it is far from being a member of my team.
Steve Jones: It’s a good way to put it.
Amber: There was a conference that I spoke at a week or two ago, and somebody literally said, “We grew our team with AI,” and that was it. I didn’t go to the talk, but I was like, “I don’t know. Did you?”
Skyler Young: I have lunch with, some guys from Microsoft once a month. And I have to say, I read about what Microsoft and Open AI are saying in Wall Street Journal, then I go talk to these guys, right? And hear the real insight experience with AI. I am like, “Wow, these aren’t even the same solar system.”
David Botos: I think a lot of computer science influencers, which is like such a weird thing, but like, is totally a thing, they’re totally paid. Open Claw and stuff like that, I was speaking with Fidel Skyler, and I was like, we were talking about like Open Claw and I’m like, “Yeah, I was setting it up, just to like kind of hone my skills and see what’s out there because it’s like everybody’s talking about it.”
And he’s like, “Yeah, this is all AstroTurf. That being said, I would say that I would not be where I am in this industry. I have a business degree, right? The only thing that you need nowadays to the point of lowered barrier of entry, the only thing you need nowadays is actually a real curiosity to learn. I find that most people don’t actually have that. I mean, it doesn’t matter what degree or if you have any degree. I think that the reality is now with AI, if you actually spend the time and you don’t allow it to write. I mean, when I was learning how to code, I remember I was learning to code when, uh, you know, GPT-3, 3.5 was like coming out not that long ago, right? Essentially, I just didn’t let it write any line of code that I didn’t understand, and that was how I learned how to code, is I was like, “Okay, why?”
And then we would just go for like you know, multiple conversations until I understood why a certain line was there. Now so, less so, right? But, um…
Skyler Young: It takes discipline.
David Botos: It takes discipline. Discipline is a good word for it, I would say.
Amber: I am curious to talk a little bit about going back to the work that was done on Connect 211. Have you gotten any feedback on outcomes since the accessibility fixes and remediation has happened? Or do you have anything that maybe if we’re trying to motivate other people, right, to invest in this, have you seen anything besides just, “Oh, we’re gonna have the compliance that we need.”
Skyler Young: So this is all still, like, in progress for us. So, you know, we’re just going through the final stages of review and deployment here. So I think that, the majority of our fixes are gonna get deployed this coming, Thursday, in fact. hasn’t been out there a whole lot. We typically get kind of cyclical user groups, feedback on stuff.
We actually just had one, so it may be at least another few months before we have another one. Most recently, the University of Washington had a traumatic brain injury cohort of users come through and kind of give some feedback on the overall user experience. It was very interesting. So we’ll be getting that feedback here pretty soon. Uh, I have seen, though, that it made us revisit our code base, which has been, as is usual for a wild startup, pretty ad hoc together, and really look at it structurally and say, “Oh, we kind of need to clean this up and approve this.” It didn’t just uncover accessibility problems.
The accessibility problems were being caused by other problems. The whole thing worked, but now that we’ve given our whole front end a really thorough going over, it’s a lot cleaner and more put together, which goes straight to the cost of maintainability and adding new features and stuff. So I’ve just been pretty happy with the whole process, to be honest.
Amber: I think it is interesting how accessibility can frequently uncover other things when you’re doing the accessibility audit or trying to figure out how to solve the accessibility problem, so. And I…
Skyler Young: Yeah.
Amber: … Give you guys kudos on the user testing ’cause not a lot of people do that or have partners that can help them do that. And, the traumatic brain injury group is a really interesting group, and I can imagine it could be really vague, like especially if you’re serving vets or, other people…
Skyler Young: Yeah.
Amber: …that might need services through 2-1-1, so that’s really neat.
Steve Jones: Well, we appreciate you both being on the podcast today, and I think that I’ve got a, final question that I think it would be good to end on here. What advice would you have for developers doing similar work? Since you’re not necessarily accessibility professionals trained in accessibility but you are now met with the requirements of having to meet a certain level of WCAG, um, conformance.
What advice would you give to developers in a similar position?
Skyler Young: Use that Tab key. The WebAIM WAVE tools. Like, at least be looking and do some basic learning just to understand how screen readers work at least. I’m thinking from the realities of the constraints of a wild startup again. Like, we don’t always have time to put the Nth degree of effort into things that we’d like. The production environment’s real. But, it hasn’t taken a whole lot, we’ve found, under the pressure of 508 compliance, to get moderately fluent, and educated about what’s required. And it at least gets us off to the right start. And then I’m not saying it ’cause we’re on this podcast, but, like, my worldview has shifted.
Definitely get a trained team in the loop at least occasionally because it has made such a difference, and it’s also been very educating. I know a hell of a lot more about what to do correctly after going through this process with Amber and the team. So that’d be my feedback. David?
David Botos: Yeah, from a very, practical standpoint, if you are taking a report, and you’re actioning it, then I would say the first thing to do is to basically split up the work. AI is, is not a team member. But, a lot of the ways that you need to think, I’ve noticed, actually kind of come more from the frame of my business degree, and thinking about how to organize tasks and think about things as processes instead of as tasks, right? Just focusing on that and then having the discipline to not see something that looks done as being done. I think that, in an age where things getting by is easier, having discipline, actually learning, to Skyler’s point, taking the opportunity to pick up what you can, and, caring about your craft, right?
If you don’t care about what you do, then, we’re not on this world to make money, right? And, you should think about what you really, invest your time in.
Amber: Yeah, I love that. I think that that’s a good circle back to just, like, the value even that Connect 211 provides and supporting other folks. And I mean, we talk about this all the time ’cause we have a pretty powerful free plugin that people have said, “You give too much away for free.” But I’m like, “I just wanna make the world better,” you know? So I love that.
Thank you both for coming on. If anyone wants to follow up with you or find out more about Connect 211, where should they go?
Skyler Young: Connect211.com. Yep, it’s all there. Or hello@connect211.com. You can email that and we’ll be there!
Amber: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. And for everyone else, we’ll be back in another two weeks with another episode.
Steve Jones: All right. Cheers.
Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you found this episode valuable, please help us reach more people by subscribing, reviewing, or liking the show, and sharing this with your colleagues. Accessibility Craft is a production of Equalize Digital Inc. Steve Jones composed our theme music. To learn how Equalize Digital can support you on your accessibility journey, visit us at EqualizeDigital.com.