Accessibility, Sustainability and the Open Web  ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: Accessibility, Sustainability and the Open Web - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[accessibility]] [[performance]] [[sustainability]] - Summary: Accessibility, Sustainability and the Open Web - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdXIW8zYRSE Hi everybody. My name is John Lockhart from the the University of Edinburgh and um and uh I'm glad to be here speaking to you today. Um I just want to give a kind of broad overview of who this talk is for which is a nice way of saying basically everybody you know like anyone who's interested in this subject in general you're all welcome from university government web communications teams agencies product owners uh c contribute to uh Drupal developers this is a subject for everybody and it's something that's been focusing my mind for some time I should probably give a um I'm not very linear by the way I'm a bit circular so I hope this goes well but If I start saying things then it's not part of the script but it might fit in. We'll see. But um uh I was here I I was actually not here but in um Barcelona last year doing a talk about accessibility and governance and uh recently it's become of interest to me that I'm very interested in web accessibility but also sustainability. It's actually comes some interest me over the past two years how much they have in common which is partly what this talk is about really. So I'm going to go through that. Um, this is just an overview of the basically the session map where we're going with this. But as I say, I've got a few slides to get through. So, I'm going to skip over this as it were. Um, the learning objectives from this, we're hoping to see, well, hopefully by the end of this, we'll hopefully see how accessibility and sustainability reinforce each other and in many words complement each other. how we map the web sustainability guidelines to Drupal configurations and modules within a Drupal framework. How we appreciate UX strategies and core web vital strategies and estimating carbon strategies. How we appreciate those and how we can embed practices via government governance into our workflows and how that relates to the Drupal open web manifesto. So let's hope why now? Um my first instinct to that is why not? And I've been interested in web accessibility for some time now. And uh and now that I've been thinking a lot more about web sustainability and web accessibility, there's always this is always just a good thing to do. It's just good moral stuff to do. But I will admit there's been some recent drivers that have maybe focused the attention on some people. Um the European Accessibility Act has basically been made effective in 2025. So we're in that world now where in the the European Union. Um there's legislation to heighten and strengthen the the access conformance with accessibility guidelines. Um I know that's not quite straightforward, but if you take it from my perspective, I work for a public sector university in the UK. We're um part of the web accessibility directive I think which is throughout Europe where essentially to sum it up we have to comply with the W3C wag 2.2A standards and we have to produce an accessibility statement based upon our reporting and auditing of our websites to produce to that and uh so this is something that affects the public sector not only in Britain but throughout the European Union and this is now being rolled out in some form or another across the European Union. It's early days and I'll be the first to first to admit I'm not an expert in the admit I'm not an expert in the UK UK accessibility act but it's something accessibility act but it's something that's becoming increasingly to that's becoming increasingly to everyone's attention. So that's one of everyone's attention. So that's one of the major drivers that's come into force the major drivers that's come into force this year. Um WAG itself 2.2 is now this year. Um WAG itself 2.2 is now stable with the new success criteria stable with the new success criteria involved. And uh and this is at this involved. And uh and this is at this point where I promise you I don't fully point where I promise you I don't fully understand this but let me give this a go. Um, in terms of web performance, it's interesting that um, as a core web vital, there's moves in how core web vitals are essentially three specific metrics that Google use to quantify the experience of their web pages and loading, interactivity, and visual stability. These metrics are considered important as how they determine their set search engine ranking. And there's been a recent move to something which I'll be the first one to admit. don't fully understand this but the interaction to next paint in essence Google moved to this move to get a better measure of how interactive and responsible website is from the users's perspective for the duration of their visit so that includes the full latency of all their user interactions whe taps and clicks or pressure keyboard pressures and they hope to paint a more comprehensive and accurate picture of the pages real world responsiveness now to me this is slightly boiling down to metrics because this is something I'm going to be coming back to throughout this presentation is performance. You know, performance is going to come up again and again in this and this is just again one way of seeing how performance metrics will make an appearance in this presentation on many slides going forward. So that's some of the um external things. This is by no means all that's going on, but there's some of the things to be aware of as to why we're motivated to talk about this, but I'm just happy to talk about this because I genuinely found it interesting. uh about for the past two years I found this crossover and this overlap quite interesting. So I think the core thesis here is that or let me try and let me try and put it this way. The core thesis is that accessible websites are often simpler and faster. There are simpler and faster websites are more energy efficient in themselves and open web choices reduce bloat and lock in. So ultimately less cognitive load and fewer bytes shipped that can equal to better for users and better for the planet. That's a sort of core thesis there. Um I've attempted to put a sort of accessibility sustainability overlap into one slide how successful this is. You'll be the judge of that. But there's some elements here. Semantic HTML. If you're using more semantic HTML as it should be used that is a richer accessible experience. You have less of the reliance on JavaScript performance. Again, that is just better for everybody, better for assisted technology, better for everybody, and reduces energy use. Content strategy with fewer clear pages, less waste. I've I've been reading recently a number of blogs from our my colleagues at the university of the importance of content auditing and content strategy and going through your existing content and bluntly put getting rid of content. That's a rather brutal way of looking at it, but improving improves the navigation. There's just shorter user journeys. It makes a massive difference. And that's something that I've been reading my colleagues blog posting and I'll refer to a couple of those. It's an it's not directly my area, but I find it interesting how it's becoming a really important part of our strategy at the University of Edinburgh. And device awareness. So you anything that's perceivable on a website and it's more perceivable and less unnecessary data usage. Um in in the UK we're subject to these um online newspapers. I won't name any names, but if you try and use their websites, you're there's almost an onslaught of autoplay videos and overlays and things and these everything just slows down the experience when actually what you're wanting is the content. So, anything that's blocking you, anything that's a friction between you and the content that you came for in the first place, um try and get rid of that bloat basically. Um, so an accessible web is often a greener web. By focusing on inclusive, efficient design, we eliminate waste, wasted bites, wasted energy, and wasted user effort. Um, okay. So, I'm just going to talk a little bit about the W3C web sustainability guidelines. Again, I'm not an expert in this, but I'll I'll give it a go. uh the draft web sustainability guidelines were inspired by the success of the web content accessibility guidelines WACAG in improving web practices and there's a a link to the blog post there talking a bit more about it and there is of course the actual draft guidelines itself the the two share a common ethos you want to put people first you want to optimize for equitable access so what is it what are they so it's um a draft guidelines document available online. Um it's divided up into four categories. It covers user experience, web development, hosting, infrastructure, and business and product. And like WAG, it has evidence-based guidelines and success criteria. Still a draft, so it's not official. Um I've got here think WICAG inspired but for the sustainability across the product life cycle. This is important to me because about approximately five years ago, I was basically in in charge at some level of um moving our what was then the law school website over to a new platform. I won't bore you with that, but we moved it to essentially a Drupal based platform, but at that time we were working with a third party agency for the for the design for the for the front end pattern lab design. And um like the nature of projects, it's still edged upon my heart that the the the nature of these projects you were given the the the the pattern library, the design library and you're basically there to implement it. It's all implemented and just at that time in the UK the uh regulations for public sector body accessibility regulations came in right then. So from day one our website had to be accessible and meet to the WAG. It's back then 2.1A and it had to be that from day one and that will be etched upon my heart. I'll never forget that because it's become quite clear that whilst I was interested in accessibility before I will admit I wasn't prepared for how we had to really get that right. Uh and it was a third party agency and no offense but third party agencies are not necessarily renowned for their expertise and the subtleties of the WTC WKAG um regulations. Don't mean to offend anybody. just just making a point of what how I found out at the time. So what's interesting to me at least is that um uh from the the fact that I work at the University of Edinburgh, it's really edged upon my brain that um we are dominated by us meeting uh the the WICAG regulations and that's um it's law as far as we're concerned, you know, and and the organization is very very keen on on meeting those guidelines. So it's not just maybe some other people it's it's like a nice to have for me it's it's the law and we're seeing that in the direction of travel with the European accessibility act and all that. Um I find this new set of regulations for the web sustainability guidelines interesting because it's a move into a similar territory for me that I certainly see at the University of Edinburgh. There's a big push uh uh a s there's been a lot of projects about sustainability across the whole university estate and digital hosting infrastructure part of that including websites and I would not be at all surprised I have no evidence for this but I would not be at all surprised in the future legislation in long term will go down that road and in the same way that they use WCAG as a baseline for people to meet I wouldn't be at all surprised of looking at these regulations going forward maybe not in the foreseeable future But I definitely see that something similar will occur probably in the public sector and then going forward. So there's reasons why the public sector get put in first. But I won't get too distracted about that for now. But I I can certainly this is the direction of travel as far as I'm concerned. Now people may disagree with me on this, but in the same way that my life is obsessed with accessibility. I can certainly see a direction of travel with this and and also it's just good moral stuff as I hope you'll see over time. you may may or may not agree with everything, but there's something there to be said about it. So, so I'll just briefly quickly go through like some of the categories here. Just kind of skim over some of these. Um, as I say, of course, going to the original documents obviously going to be best, but um um some of the things raised in the the UX category, minimizing non-essential content, again, it's interesting how a number of colleagues are focusing on that, having clear information architecture and patterns. So when you've got your design libraries, make sure that you've got consistent templates, consistent approaches to presenting information. It's good for the user. Good. Um inclusive language, readable typography, and respecting user preferences. There's a lot of users that may choose to configure their browsers or their devices in their way and don't particularly want things thrust upon them in certain ways. So just always being respectful of that. They may have the reasons for that. Um it's just less friction for all. there's fewer bytes involved. Um, web development, removing render blocking. Sometimes you'll have like some third party script that will actually prevent the page from being loaded or or actually prevent being loaded quickly or correctly. trying to remove unnecessary or unused assets, using native semantics, trying to trying to resort to using good semantic HTML rather than using um things that both the browser and sometimes the assisted technology doesn't fully understand. It's always good to remember that if you're using assisted technologies, screen readers, other software, minimizing dependencies on your frameworks, optimizing images and video. And fonts to a certain extent, but optimizing images and video. You'll you'll see I wouldn't try and jump around too much, but if you want big wins, images and video are certainly something that you should be looking at. And of course, um, guardrails using your CI CD pipeline pip flow if if your team uses that. Um, and I'll try not to jump around, but in some ways Drupal can quite shine quite well in this area because when you install Drupal core, it already comes a lot with same defaults and module choices if you just start from Drupal core from the start. So there's a lot I'll come back to this, but there's a lot of good stuff built in already in the Drupal core framework. So we'll do that. Um, hosting and infrastructure. This is quite interesting um about um again according to the guidelines how you go about choosing greener providers for your hosting and grids. Um I I person I might come back to this but I find this area quite interesting personally because u we I'm going to refer to a set of blog posts later on and it's interesting how a lot of work was done at the university to find out what was going on. I think I think I'm allowed to say this at my university half the time we're trying to get the data just to work out what on earth is going on. And I think it's interesting to raise this that um um we've had a wonderful um um man Oshu and but other people who've looked into this and I think without going too deep into it the the short answer is it depends. You know if you're trying to work out your your your your host is your host a green provider or not? The answer is it depends. It's complicated and nobody's really got any straight answers. And maybe certain hosting providers. Maybe some people are more um upfront and helpful in telling you what the situation is. Maybe some other ones are a little bit less more reluctant to tell you what their situation is. Sometimes it's just hard to get the data. And um uh as I say, I try not to jump around, but I remember there was a really good anecdote by an agency called Manifesto actually man um in the UK. And what I remember that was interesting that conversation I had, they gave a presentation on this. They did a a big um project with um I think a government agency actually. And the key to their um making any progress with this is that they found and let's just call them a Drupal certified partner. I'm going to try and not get into trouble today. I'll try. But um let's call them a big Drupal certified partner. And I believe that my understanding is that they made immense progress because there was a champion in the organization like somebody who was really passionate and concerned within the organization who was really prepared to dig into the detail get into the data and return the data. That was an interesting insight is that half the time you need a champion within the organization to help you find this information out because it's really hard to get this data sometimes. So it's an interesting um perspective on this um and precise and also it comes back to where is your um where your where are your where's your website being hosted what data center what's the how's it being powered and I might have a I might have a question here at the back and do you want to use the microphone sir I don't I'm a bit lazy but or I mean um if you could just ask your question >> thanks would would AI me in this category. >> I promised myself I was going to try and avoid to use the word AI in this presentation. I'd made a promise to myself, but damn, you've caught me. You've caught me. You've you've like a like a big arrow. You found it, you know. >> Um I did catch that. Um did you catch the D? I was just catching it and there was some crazy statistic that opened the eyes and and they're building these data centers and they're I don't I don't exactly remember but just go back and look at the G was saying that six nuclear power stations to you know I mean it's insane right it's insane >> probably something like >> I'm happy for the data you know like all data good data it's good data to know um yeah I kind of promised myself not to talk too much about this but it's kind of unavoidable isn't Um um what I'm discussing today is really good from the perspective of governance and how you try and govern an environment. Um AI is a very very interesting area. Uh there's part of me that kind of loves it. There's part of me that kind of is horrified and terrified by the whole thing. So um I'm somewhere in the middle. But I do agree that um one of the things that's meant to come out of this presentation is that when I when I come across people who are really into engineering and technology when I do I don't do this all the time but when I do come across people who are really into engineering and technology it's funny how a lot of the time I meet them they're as passionate about some of these areas like um performance and analysis and uh if you come from a computer science background there's like kind of the complexity of algorithm you know there's a lot of engineering mindset. So actually the people who are into again I don't want to get dist distracted here but if you think about Formula 1 a lot of people who are into Formula 1 they're always looking for efficiencies. They're always looking for savings in the aerodynamics. They try reduce the car um weight and stuff. So there's there's a lot of these engineering principles a lot of these ways that people are trained as engineering they see this as opportunities for performance efficiency. So the people who are fascinated about sustainability are usually the people who are interested in performance as well. So there's some crossover here and I try and have a relatively open-minded view about this. So we're coming back to the question of AI. I'm excited and but also at the same time I'm trying not to swear there. There's a there's a lot of excitement, a lot of interest there, but there's also a lot of hype out there. And I think Lenn Turvalz the creator of Linux said something similar is that I love AI. AI is going to be part of our infrastructure. Same way that 20 years ago the internet was going to be part of our infrastructure. AI is going to be part of our infrastructure. But man, the hype right now it makes you want to lie down sometimes. So yes, I love AI, but I do see that there's a lot of people in the first wave who are just keen to throw nuclear reactors at this problem. But I think long term I'd like to be optimistic and say that the um sustainability will kick into the way I I've heard ane I've heard anecdotal reports that Google and OpenAI claim that they're getting some of their search queries to be almost as good as your traditional old style Google query. Whether you believe that or not, this is just anecdotal evidence. But one would like to think that the engineers have got a motivation to and also it just makes financial sense at some point. You can't just keep spending money you don't have. You want to be efficient and optimize over time anyway. So it's probably a very woolly answer to the question. I try and keep an open mind with the eye, but at the same time I do have mixed feelings about it. Part of me loves it, part of me. So I don't know if that's an answer, but I'll I'll go with that. But I do find a lot of these principles in here again good governance and a good approach to what I guess Dre and Drupal would call the open web really important. So I'm going to try and keep to that holistic site and I'll I might mention AI again. But let's let's just try and move on. But do feel free to ask. I'm not an expert. Um again half the battle is getting the data and I know that's certainly a university that's been part of the challenge is actually just trying to acquire the data. Um oh I better mention this that um if if you're interested Edinburgh University has in my opinion well certainly one of the most advanced projects for AI. Um it's all coming out now. Um Edinburgh University has one of the most advanced projects for AI in Britain, the United Kingdom and maybe even the world. I don't know. But certainly in the United Kingdom, we've got this project called the Edinburgh language model. And it's essentially we put a lot of effort into our own interface that we put a lot of effort into um guard rails for accessibility, privacy, security. We're hosting it on our own data centers. It's on our own, you know, like own your own bricks as someone once said, you know, so we have really put a lot of effort into having it managed um on our premises, the King's Building premises. And uh and so we've started off using the open AI API with the zero data. So a lot of work has been gone into the privacy of using that because as you can imagine privacy that's a very big important thing for our approach but there's a lot of effort going into using open-source models that we really want to kind of wean ourselves off open AI and so like there's been a lot of um emphasis on using more on our internal hardware using like I think I think the one that comes to mind is llama Facebook's llama and that's actually hosted in house and so we don't have any need to go outside the building if that makes sense and one of the the The reason I'm telling the story is that um we're quite proud of the ELM, but what's interesting is that one of the motivating factors is to become more sustainable about using our um AI models. And one of the reasons given is that we're really looking hard not just at Lama, but other open source models, but we're looking at Llama because that's an important part of our sustainability strategy. Now, I'm not going to start cla and I don't know, by the way, but I'm not going to start claiming that llama is somehow a more um sustainable AI model, but one of the things we can do is by having our own hardware, we can actually do some data to try and understand what energy usage is actually using because at the moment, we don't know. So this is again part of our I'm not going to claim that lamb is somehow an efficient model but at least we can start by looking at the data of how much we're using in our own infrastructure to try and judge these kind of things. So it's a start. So it's part of a strategy. >> How did you call the problem and how did you call this problem this AI problem? >> How did I solve this AI problem? But the name of the name of the >> Oh, sorry. I do apolog. We have a habit of calling things after ourselves, but um but if you go into the Edinburghed.ac.uk website and search for the Edinburgh language model, there'll be more information there. And I I think it's safe to say that the Edinburgh is one of the leading if not the leading university in Britain for sure, United Kingdom. I think there are I I genuinely think we're way ahead in in compared to other institutions. I mean I I would say that but I genuinely think we are we're pretty ahead of that and I can't speak for international universities but I think we're doing okay there. plug for Edinburgh and but there's also another plug for Edinburgh later on but that's not um uh and sorry so I coming back to this um caching aggressively um showing that you this is back to the W um WSG guidelines about caching your content aggressively trying to use content delivery networks um compressing all the information that's being squirted out um using modern modern protocols like HTTP2 that really the whole point is to try and squirt that data out more efficiently um as possible and long-term plans for resilience. The infra in infrastructure decisions are in themselves user experience decisions and sustainability decisions. So it's a you know this time it's it's really the case that the hardware is at the the core of what you're delivering. Um and finally um business and product. Um this is to show that certainly in in Edinburgh as well that there's a big focus not just on the the technology but there's a lot of the governance that goes into ensuring that your whole approach is meeting these standards. So trying to assign ownership and try to set budgets and KPIs to departments and uh key stakeholders um report progress with continuous improvement. favoring open source and transparency. Again, you know, Drupal's um absolutely perfect for that. And um and then a plan for end of life and archival strategies. Again, with content auditing, we're going through a major process of archiving content. That's a big part of what it is we're doing is archiving content. I'm going to get into trouble. I cannot tell you how many websites are in the university state. I'm not going to get into trouble. I can't tell you. It's Let's just leave it at that. Okay. Um, and I'm really trying not to get into trouble today. I'll do my best. Uh, so how does Drupal fit into all this? Um, I think the good news is that by implementing uh the WSG recommendations, it's very achievable within a Drupal framework. I I always prefer to mention the Drupal core framework. You know, I think it's easier just to say if you focus on Drupal core and then from there build up, you know, that there's configurations you can make. you know, you install Drupal core as we all know, you can build up from like modules and and configurations and uh and a lot of those efforts within core and the community provide modules a lot of the efforts there already support these best practices. So in many cases Drupal core and the community provided modules they already support these best practices basically. So if you look at Drupal core today you've got strengths in there already. You've got the olive arrow theme, you know, a theme that a lot of work has went into that theme to ensure its compatibility with WICAG. It's a it's a really great baseline theme. Um the opportunity to do responsive imagery and image styles in core lazy load again an an example I would say of open web where lazy load is something that was built into Drupal core. It's just something that you've got advantage of being part of the framework though over time as you're on the so-called train lines in Drupal core. Things come along where you can take benefit of that just by being on the framework. So that's a nice touch that it's a nice pattern that you see sometimes in Drupal where some of these things can just come along as well. Also the caching layer in in Drupal I think is is well known and really in some ways amazing that the caching where in Drupal. So, a lot of a lot of the stuff is already there and it may need to be switched on or configured or governed, but there's a lot of good stuff already built into that framework. And I'm not an expert in other frameworks, but I've always been consistently impressed with Drupal about how well it manages to adapt to these sort of situations. There's a lot built in there. As I say, I'm I'm not going to try to talk too much about other frameworks, partly because I'm not that expert in other frameworks, but um it's something particularly um evident in Drupal and it ties in with their open web approach and the open web manifesto. It's quite nice to see. Um as part of the strategy, you can introduce accessibility guardrails for authors. There's a lovely module called editorially that I I will admit I don't use it in our active websites but I have played with it and it's a very nice um um it's a nice module you can install on your your Drupal websites where essentially it does a sort of inline authoring checks for accessibility. It's a very nice module and um and I'd highly recommend you you you Google it and take a look at it. It's um maintained by um um the person I know is from Princeton University I think. um he he um I think he's one of the maintainers if not the lead on it and it's a very nice um if you go to their website and check it out it's like a an editorial facing um accessibility checker and uh so as an editor you can it raises issues within the editor to see if you're coming across any potential issues. So that's a nice thing. It adds some guard rails for authors. It's it's a nice way of looking at that. But also um just coming back to um we use a platform our web our platform at the University of Edinburgh is called Ed Webb 2. And so some of the next things we implement in our framework for example we enforce alt text in the media forms um as part of um the ed web 2 platform which is Drupal based it's it's a Drupal platform we have heading structure guidance not only in the platform but also in the editorial documentation and the training people are forced to go through well they have to go through manager training let's put that manager training which raises not only the how to use the platform but also effective digital content and issues like this tie of how you use the platform to its best ability. Um the component library we use um a design library called Edgel and so that's very tightly coupled with the content management system obviously. So the component library is very um heavily tested with tested patterns content patterns. We've got a whole UX team. I'm I'm going to say the word um Em Murl who's the user experience manager at university and a big Drupal contributor. So again a lot of um work is going into the user experience aspect of our platform. So again these kind of guard rails that with sufficient training and support for the platform people can um deliver both accessible but sustainable experiences. Images are clearly the biggest easiest wins. You know like being able to configure responsive images per breakpoint using a a file format like webp. Now again, I'm not I'm not a guru, but I'm going to just quickly go over this that WEBP is an image file format developed by Google that provides superior comp compression for images on the web, resulting in smaller file sizes and faster page loading time. So um my my understanding is that um uh it's becoming easier in Drupal core going forward to maybe make it's much more easier I think for sure if you just install Drupal from day one but there's um movements towards using these more advanced um image formats as part of that. I don't think they're mandatory as I say I'm not absolutely sure but I think there's more effort to make sure that those there are things that you can deliver through the platform basically and I'll come back to a second how Edinburgh has has approached that um issue um defining the quality and size budgets per template of imagery um if your templates are if you've got standard templates you can try and control the degree of of when images are used within that maybe even giving budget to certain templates and preferring an SVGs over simple graphic icons. It's making it's making these winds coming from images and starting to make it policy. It's not just a suggestion. You try and implement as policy into the uh the content management system. I've got an example later on. So that's maybe why I'm mentioning it there. Um some front-end performance tuning. um it to make sure that when you go into your your platform, make sure that the CSS and the JS aggre aggregation make sure that that's turned on and trying try and make efforts to defer non-critical JavaScript and ideally trying to reduce JavaScript by default but that's maybe a rather extreme view. Uh a lot of the time when you do an audit over the web pages sometimes it's third party tags that's sometimes when you're doing a page weight or something that's making a page load slower it can be that maybe there's some sort of third party library or some um something that's been added that could be slowing that. So again it's worth doing an audit again coming back to doing audits and trying to get data to try and understand where there may be issues. That's a kind of recurring theme in this presentation. Um so again taking advantage of the really caching abilities of Drupal um and and combining that with content delivery networks and to try and make sure that if you've got especially an international audience making sure that that that data gets closer cash to their territory especially if you've got an international university for example people trying to access data from there uh cut down on direct access to our own servers as it were um and uh and correcting cache metadata. um it's it's it's it's trying to lower server work basically in that regard. Um use of um semantic HTML markup. It's it's really important from the perspective of it just makes I think life a lot simpler for everybody. But also when you're using assisted technologies, I know that I've used screen readers in the past where if you have an assisted technology that's trying to understand what's going on, it's going to understand a semantic HTML, something that's clearer rather than maybe something that's been if you've got an element that's been maybe done using JavaScript or something, the the assisted technology is going to understand it better. which which then reduces complexity to the page and just um trying to stick to again the screen users in mind landmark regions and correct heading orders real buttons as opposed to using a a div or some JavaScript actually using a real button um HTML um is better for this technology uses less JavaScript it's just a more durable user interface over time um medial alternatives and alternative alt text is essentially default on our platform perform as default on Drupal and modern Drupal frameworks. Alt text that's informative, not decorative, captions and transcripts for audio visual elements. Um offering text equivalents to media uh heavy media items. If if you're near a university and you've got a really very good computer and a very good um uh connection, that's fine. But if you're on your mobile in certain parts of the world and you're not getting connection, sometimes being a bit more forgiving of saying maybe you don't autoplay that video and then you can maybe offer a transcript ideally to that video that allows people to especially both for accessibility reasons but sustainability. People can get an idea of what the video is about without necessarily having to um download the video or at least making it an option. So if they're just trying to get to access information on the page, it's respecting user choice and uh trying to um also trying to avoid unnecessary data transfer. So interesting there. Um content strategy and sustainability. Um it's not my specialist area, but I've got a number of colleagues and that includes um Emma who is here and she'll be speaking on Thursday by the way. to do check out Emma Herell's talk is that um content strategy and sustainability there's a big effort amongst a number of my colleagues to perform content audits and uh and within our existing estate and it just leads to better results I think Emma blogged blogged about this quite recently with a recent example in the career service I think it was where you try and prune the rot you know the redundant outdated trivial content clearer navigation you limit the depth of the content with possible will reduce the the nature of the un user journey. Um so like a a shorter quicker user journey template library it so it just makes life um easier and it's a pattern that I see again at the university that the first thing you do when you re when you're re-evaluating your website looking at content audits fewer better pages would equal a lower cognitive load and fewer resources. Um, again, hosting and providers. Um, I think I've touched on this already, but it's interesting to really work with your partners to do your best to try and get the data to try and understand that do they support the latest um protocols like HTTP2 and there's and where if you're extreme, you can maybe go and say, well, where are you hosting your data? Where where are these data centers? What are they powered by? you know, now that's a that's a whole that's a whole other level of detail, but it's certainly something that's um happening not only within the university, but also these metrics tools that I'll mention later on. A lot we're we're looking at a lot of tools that are hopefully going to try and attempt to identify the data going forward as to where where is your data being hosted and how is it being hosted and used and how's it being powered. So there's that's I can see that it's in its infancy at the moment, but it's certainly going to be increasingly relevant and especially as we become more dependent on dashboards and metrics and it'll be interesting to see that. Um and by by tracking it, we'll be able to get more um definable results as to where our hosting and how performant it is. I threw in this this just here about the analytics. I I put here a company called Matmo. I know nothing about them. But I think it was more to just try and illustrate that that a lot of people are obviously using the popular analytics providers and maybe using other it may be worth examining using different analytics um solutions and it may be depending on your analytics provider. It may be um worth investigating what's in the market and maybe being able to maybe in our case University of Edinburgh maybe it's something that we may look to in the future. we maybe have more we may be inclined to have a more sovereign approach in the future. I'm not saying that's that's just my opinion. I I don't have any evidence for that. But it could be that we maybe one day we may say well yes like like everyone else we're using Google Analytics. But maybe one day we might ask ourselves well how would we make our data more sovereign? Uh and then in that approach not only how do I make it more sovereign but how where am I hosting it and how performant it is. So, it's um it's something to bear in mind. Um a lot of the third parties may have third party scripts that you're asked to put on your website. Um maybe each one of those adds a certain degree of latency. Every time somebody asks to add something to your website, some third party um um piece of code that you put in that adds latency, potential bloat, potential accessibility issues. So maybe as a part of an audit we should be quite clear about what's going on and maybe have a very clear audit about what we need and what we don't and that in itself can help the performance and the sustainability of the site. Now this is a bit extreme um these are just not so don't don't get too um worried about the numbers here but it's just to try and say this is maybe one approach is to try and say well how do you start quantifying some of this stuff? Is there some tools that could help you as part of your audit? Say for a typical template, how how much weight is there for a typical template? You know, how much JavaScript appears on certain pages? Um, some of the the core web titles. Okay, maybe maybe I don't understand this, but these could be as part of an audit. You could um I suppose feasibly have people do some serious auditing of your website and try and get some data and some numbers to try and understand what's going on and maybe some image constraints per the components that you're using or the templates that you're using. Numbers create clarity. You know, you have that as part of your workflow to say that you can report back and say, well, this is what we're identifying here. Maybe some improvements could be made in the framework. Um coming back to things I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't know. I don't know if you see a pattern emerging here. Um so certain teams have um uh CI/CD pipelines, continuous integration pipelines. So as part of regression testing, I know that the Edinburgh team uses um some regression testing tools as part of the workflow. I don't believe that they use these, but these were some suggestions for maybe as a potential if your if your team is already using um pipelines. This could be some of the things that you could consider introducing into your workflow. And of course, you I've only actually used I've actually only used one of these and that was the Pali one. And again, it's a it's something you may determine whether you want to include or not as part of your workflow, but it's certainly worth investigating. These are things that you could certainly use as part of your workflow. you your team may decide not to, but they may also decide to investigate it further because it could um give you some ideas that when you for example if something makes a change to your design system, for example, then if something fails based upon the the change that was made, you can maybe sort of go back and see what was the issue was if there was something that was brought up and maybe over time that could help um get a picture of how contributions to the the codebase could maybe um over time determine issues that are raised. You know, think any issues that are brought into the design system. You want to try and eliminate them at the start initially rather than sort of wait for something to be added and then retrospectively realize it's a bad idea. So maybe maybe these approaches and tools could help. Um I'm being a bit careful here, but they could they could be part of a workflow. It it might be part of a potential workflow. Um dashboards and reporting. Um I'll try and come on to later on about some of the things we use in Edinburgh, but it could be that more data and analyt more data is important for how we make our decisions um per p per per template um data about the number of bytes that are used in certain templates. Any accessibility issues that are are raised and through the age of the issue. um e estimating key journeys using like carbon data to try and understand these key journeys. Part of an ongoing governance review um and sometimes these dashboards can sort of hopefully give you some insights as to certain things where you can make improvements through your ongoing governance approach. Maybe there's a monthly quarterly review of of certain approaches and maybe dashboards can help you do that in your reporting perhaps. I'll mention a couple of tools later on about that we use at the University of Angra and again per role um people in the product and roles have to like maybe try and set budgets or prioritize outcomes in the design content roles you have to focus on the accessibility and sustainability of patterns of the information architecture trying to prune uh the content rot engineering maybe using some of those techniques and CI/CD temp um techniques in performance and engineering and in the operations. Look into your hosting and seeing if your hosting is efficient and using all the the latest techniques and abilities to and actually examine the hosting itself um to try and understand if that hosting itself is in itself naturally inclined to sustainability and the governance practices again something that you can try and introduce to something that is ongoing and and and sort of baked in over time. So they maybe have like reviews over like once a month or once a quarter. You try and have a definition of done which includes checks on accessibility and performance checks, pre-launch audits or post-launch reviews, change logs, and maybe some red flags that maybe occur when you know that something has been breached or something. trying to have a bakedin ritual that keeps the standards alive ongoing rather than for example we've had an experience at the university at the moment where people come and people go and of course they have specialist knowledge in those organizations and they have their specialist knowledge but when they leave the organization we lose that knowledge and so anything you can do to try and bake that into the process the the framework the governance the data you know anything you can build in that it's an ongoing effort rather than somebody walking in the building and taking that. Um, they may be doing great heroic work, but if they've left, nobody knows where to pick up and if there's nothing in the the framework to keep that work going, you're going to lose a lot of that and it's going to be well, it's hard for the organization obviously. Um, I'm going to introduce so I'm going to try and drag this back to a case study which is basically the University of Edinburgh. They've got a case study here. Um um there's a pattern here in the sense that I should state this from the start. I did nothing. The work was done by the people I'm going to tell you about. So they deserve all the credit and all the work. So they deserve it all. I did nothing. I'm just I'm really interested in accessibility and I'm here to talk about accessibility and sustainability. But the there's been a lot of really great work done by the team in this student internship program which has led to a real emphasis on digital sustainability work. not just within the interns but throughout the whole web team and I think beyond in the whole information services um structure it's this work has really um influenced thinking and that's a big step from for me observing from the outside I suppose that it's really affected the way people think about their roles and how they approach their roles it's had a seismic effect on certainly the the web team ed web team and the wider team in information services it's um this ongoing sustainability um review has brought up a lot. It's made people change their way of thinking and how they approach their world. So it's it's fascinating to observe this. Um the focus of there have been a number of focuses on this. I've talked about image weight but also analysis of existing user experience templates looking at content audits and redundant content with some outcomes. there's some measurable bite reductions and faster user experience and some policy updates that followed on from that. So I'll start to talk a little bit about um the experience at University of Edinburgh. So about in the past two years um student internships have worked on investigating the sustainability challenges faced by the university's web state and research potential solutions that we could consider to use in the future and we the interns were I met with the interns uh about a couple years ago I think it was the OSH Dorte and Catalina and Christopher and we've we've got another two um um sustainability interns that have joined us recently to continue on that work. The work on this these digital sustainability projects has been documented in a number of blog post. There's been a lot of work that's gone on which can be found here. If you were to take one photograph throughout this presentation, this would be the one because this is like a category of blog posts on the website communications blog and it covers um a wide range of themes raised down from user experience to content strategy to hosting. A lot of great work that's been done here. I'll try and um so I'll definitely let you have an opportunity at that picture because if there's one thing to take away from it, go back and read the the work that's gone on there. Incredible amount of work by the team who've done really amazing work and very influential work like really some serious people who really had their way of thinking uh shaped by a lot of the work that's been going on here. So, I'd highly recommend you look at those series of blog posts and uh and I certainly know that Emma Emma Horl's um posted some really interesting blog post there as well. So, she's involved as well and um I'm just going to plug Emma's talk again on Thursday by the way. So, do check out the program. Emma Horl, she'll be um talking soon and she'll no doubt be mentioning some of these related issues as well. So, I should probably explain that Edw is the name of the University of Edinburgh's Drupal web content management system. The University of Edinburgh has a has a centralized content management system like a lot of universities do. We've got a central web platform and it's called Ed Webb 2. Um, I'll try not to give you too much of a history, but as you might imagine, there was an Ed Webb one. You might imagine that. And after some serious deliberation by the team, I think over a number over a number of months, maybe even years, it was finally decided that Ed Webb 2 was going to be the natural name for for the next content management system. From my perspective, the serious um change that happened between Ed Webb 1 and Ed Webb 2 was Ed Webb 1 was essentially based on Drupal 7 and Drupal. Um, so Ed Webb 2 was really the move to Ed Web. I think it was it was the move to Drupal 9. I think it was it was the the move from so from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 that was the big architectural move then and that was the big side but there was a lot of um a lot of other things on top of that as well. just to give you the kind of context as to so um and this was that this was fully implemented about two three years ago this transition from Edra on to Edward too so it's the central university web content management system and um as as you might imagine with it being on that Drupal 9 Drupal 10 um uh rail track um obviously um the the we're we're talking about a different beast obviously compared to the old system of Drupal 7 we are a different beast And so the because we're on the train tracks, we are all um uh it's constantly being updated and there's a lot of work gone on by the team. And there was a recent update um I think a couple of months ago which u successfully implemented some sustainable web design principles across 65,539 pages. Now this is where I'm going to start getting into trouble here. So I'm trying not to tell you it's just as well I don't know because I'm trying not to tell you how many websites we have. Um and um the way that Ed Webb 2 is structured is that we've got a range of um and I'm again I'm not an expert in this but essentially you've got the um you've got the core code co um code base and then the way that it's architected we have a number of websites for schools and departments and it's all um controlled by that um uh core code base and of course any changes are then aggregated to the the network. So you've got um the the school sites, you've got um departmental sites and below that you've got subsites as well. So um any changes are obviously found out across those um that web estate. So it's trying to I'm trying to paint the sense of scale there so that when changes happen they happen at a big scale. So that that that that figure of 65,539 approximately web pages just to give you a sense of this the scale of the change that we're making here. So so what changed? So the ED web 2 made uh team made two key changes to reduce the page weight of the websites. Simply put, it meant that the file size of ED web 2 web pages were smaller, meaning less energy is needed to be stored, loaded, and to transfer them. And it might seem like a small change, but it has a big impact when the web pages are transferred thousands of times a day by users. So, um it's it's obviously a big change. So, what was the change? Well, it was a a big um a sort of big win change uh is that image upload size was limited down to one megabyte per image. Now, that as you might imagine had a a huge um impact. Um certainly from my personal experience I've I managed websites where maybe in the past we weren't as vigilant in capping that um that upload. So of course when you look at your server you go back in the dashboard and you look how much data is in your your server that that that that in itself can make a massive difference. So it's obviously been implemented to reduce any outliers and huge image files that are energy intensive. Honor image size is across all layouts templates where it's just like I mean front page for example. >> So >> sorry. >> Yeah. Sorry, not if you >> Oh, yeah. Perfect. Yeah. >> Um I was wondering if the image upload size was across all uh templates and layouts like for example front page as well. >> Yes. >> Like banner white, right? >> No, I I sorry I do apologize. I agree. >> No, I agree. In principle, yes. You know, I'm not going to rule out the possibility that there may be custom pages on the network somewhere, but but like this is like a a it's a platform that as you say, everyone gets the same interface. Everyone gets the same. So like when when images are uploaded, it's my understanding that yes, anytime somebody tries to upload an image, um they they meet that cap regard. Now that's I'm not going to exclude the possibility that there may be somebody who's done a page somewhere that may have done something but but on the whole that the the framework the actual edeb 2 framework the product you you you will meet that cap is is um is truth. So that's my that's my understanding and I will admit I may know may not precisely know but that's my understanding. We're talking about a product and that's been implemented across the product. Okay. >> Yeah. And um and on top of that um all images have been automatically converted to the WEBP format. And WEBP format itself I've got some data here that WEBP itself is around 25% to 34% smaller than JPEGs and therefore a quick win for making your website more efficient. I've got a little bit more information here, but essentially um we my understanding is that we used um SA I think it was the ED web 2 team that used a Drupal module. There's the webp module which essentially my understanding is that webp the webp module applies a filter that means that users can upload images following usual guidance that we offer and the application does the rest so it's actually a webp module that's doing the work and um although I don't use it myself that is um I'm trying to sort of emphasize the importance of the fact that I think um our our senior web developer Billy Waldrop says here the over time they've looked at options for image optimization in the past but all of them in some way required significant manual effort. This module of something that you could apply across the network and the changes that come with that across it I mean it it's trying to emphasize the scale here but being able to implement a change like that across a wide range of websites and web pages. So it's powerful and u it maybe took a a while to find the right solution but when it was found it had a powerful impact on our um a big win to to put it bluntly and uh I think it's to try and emphasize it's kind of hard to talk about other frameworks but the power of the Drupal framework that it it's nice that these things come along. I remember talk about the the lazy load for example lazy load came along and that was something that could be brought in through the framework that you could apply that across the framework. Now, I'm not saying it's that straightforward, but I do and it's kind of hard to talk about other frameworks, but there is a real power there. And especially when you're dealing with scale and the scale that we're dealing with at the Ed Webb 2 platform, these are big changes that have big consequences and and and really have big impact on things. So, it's um it's nice to or certainly nice to observe that. Um sorry I'll and just uh also to mention that um in the importance of data tools the interns used a number of digital sustainability tools to try and measure um to to try and measure the impact um on our web estate. Basically I've mentioned a couple here ecograder and website carbon calculator. I personally not use these too often but these were certainly tools that I think Ash and the team were using to again get the data and I think that's the the pattern that we've been observing is that people are trying to get the data um I personally don't entirely if somebody would say to me do these tools are they perfect and I say well I don't know but they're an insight and I would imagine that certainly that the team have been using tools like this to get an insight to give you an insight as to what's going on in your state. So um I think that's certainly what we're talking about here is that having some information is better than having no information. So and certainly these were tools that were used by the team and also I just wanted to mention a sort of shout out that we've collaborate the university's collaborated with um uh our we have our we use a a product called Little Forest. Now, it's a web governance software provider and they've they've partnered with the university for a long time and I'm I'm familiar with them because I'm really obsessed in web accessibility and as part of our web accessibility audit strategy, the central tool that we use for um web accessibility governance is Little Forest and it's an online software as a service. you can look them up and um we they've partnered with the university for a number of years and I just mentioned that although I'm familiar with them for website accessibility governance they do more than that we actually the university as a whole uses it for um website governance for the whole web estate across the university like a web registry for the websites that we have across our state trying to identify the the nature and scale of the websites in our website estate which can get kind of scary I better stop talking about it um and uh and they've been doing a lot of work. They're a great company because they've really been very collaborative and worked with the team to identify further metrics for their website sustainability feature as part of their product. So, they've been doing great work to help us get more data as part of their efforts to doing web registry work and to web governance work. By scanning our web estate, we're able to try and get more metrics using techniques and they've been very collaborative in helping us to do that. So that's been a very good relationship for the university and we're very happy that they're the kind of company that really have engaged with us that we've we've we've asked them well can you do this and they've really come back and done a lot of work with us. So I I just wanted to give them a shout out because they've really been um a very key part of that approach and it's it's something I'd just like to point out there and uh again you can read more about what I've just been talking about in that particular web blog post. It's also in that big list of sustainability posts as well. So if you go to that blog blog post list um that that'll be there as well and there'll be also a number of great things as well. Um, also if you'd like to learn more, you're welcome to join us. Um, we're we're going to be ho hosting um at Drupal Camp Scotland at the University of Edinburgh in November uh 7th of November 2025. And um if you if we'd love you to come and if you'd like to join us, you you'll be able to meet a number of the Edinburgh University of Edinburgh team alongside a whole number of guests from the Drupal community. Um I I sadly didn't make it la last year but I'm hoping to make it this year obviously and um u from what I heard last year was an excellent event and um I know that I was able to go down to the Drupal Camp England. So these these Drupal camp events are really great events and uh we really do welcome you to come and join us and the link is there and although it's still there I know it's still early days they've still got the um submissions coming in but I I would highly recommend you if you can join us for it. It's a great opportunity to um mix with many people and we've had some really impressive visitors last year and I'm hoping again this year will do equally as well. So uh the open web manifesto what why does it matter? Um again I'm not an expert in other frameworks but there's something about the the the Drupal open web manifesto that it's something that I'm not as aware other frameworks have. Now you experts will correct me on this but there's something about Drupal's commitment to the open web and a belief in his power as a digital public good. It's something that it's not just talk there's real um efforts within the community to deliver on that and that the by going to the open web manifesto link you'll see that there's a real commitment there uh for for things like in digital inclusion and open access and it does tie rather nicely with what's we're trying to do here. You've got open access, open standards, digital inclusion as part of the open manifesto approach. Portability over lock in which is in the long term lower term waste. I I certainly know at the university many many years ago we've had products where we're locked into web systems which were locked in and it's we are now pretty much to the best of my knowledge uh well for a start Drupal is the def the the de facto um web content management system for the University of Edinburgh. So, it's open source. So, like officially um it's an open- source um platform and I I would it really it's the only way to go really. I would be astonished if the university considered uh u any future product in web content management that wasn't open source. So, open source is key to our strategy. And I certainly know over time when you're talking about a number of years having an open source platform ultimately you own the code. You ultimately own that database. you own that code code base. And so maybe in the past with propri proprietary products, you're maybe having to if you're having to move on for whatever reason, at least with open source, you really do own that thing, you know, whereas um with private providers, that's maybe not necessarily always the case of who actually owns your data, which is becoming ever more important. And transparency in itself brings trust and resilience that if anyone's going to challenge what I say or anyone says about this, it's open source. people can go and check the the code they they can check the um the and again the metrics and the data to try and that these approaches are all built in the open. These are open these are open buildings these are open infrastructures that people can examine whereas sometimes with private providers it's not always entirely clear what their commitment is. I'm not blaming anybody. It's just because it's behind because it's behind a wall you can't always tell. Whereas with open source it's just out there. anyone can download the codebase and see for themselves what's going on. Um uh just um just getting close to um yeah don't worry getting close to the end here. Um so just some common pitfalls and myths. Um again with images are fine with cache. Um, even on the server side, we've noticed that by imposing a cap like that, it makes a massive difference even to your hosting, you know, and I'm afraid in the past I've had my emails from the the server administrator saying why why why do we have several gigabytes of of of when when actually maybe it's images that really didn't have to be there. So, sometime sometimes it's um sometimes it's maybe not a bad thing to be told you can't put up that high resolution image. Sometimes sometimes it's good to have that taken out your hands, you know. Um, accessibility slows us down and this idea of it prevents rework. I think to my mind that just comes back to this attitude that with accessibility sometimes the attitude is we'll optimize that later and later rarely comes that it's it's something that if you can implement as much as you can into your workflow before and then try and avoid the common issues then the more you can do that work beforehand then you're going to you're you you're going to save yourself a lot of preference basically from Um, so this these are just some ideas about maybe some quick wins for people's websites. If you've got your own Drupal website, it's a lot of the time just going through and just checking a lot of the things that are properly configured. Um, I I like editorially editorially I I do like it a lot as a module. I I have to admit we don't use it on our website and Ed Webb 2 doesn't use it on our website and that's largely because we have a very um sophisticated workflow and governance there. Not only within the platform but also specific training and support behind the platform. So we we we we don't I don't think editorial we would be a natural fit within what we do but I think the team would be open-minded and something like that. But certainly for a lot of other websites is certainly worth them considering uh for sort of guard rails. Um looking at third party scripts and just doing an audit of your site to see is there something that is slowing up your web page. Is there something that is that that could be um reviewed for that and over time setting page weight budgets and JavaScript budgets to try and understand um what can be constrained as it were. And again this idea of a road mapap um continuing to do the work over like a month and a quarter it's a sustainable ongoing effort. One of the issues that we come across in accessibility constantly is that it never ends. You know like I'm always being told all right well haven't we done haven't we done it yet? It's like no no this will never I work at the University of Edinburgh. This will never end. the people who I work with, trust me, this will never if we were we were going to be doing this forever, right? So, um this trying to embed a sort of um a mindset that this is something that will be done through reviews like quarterly reviews and and working with key posters and stakeholders about how they fit that into their ongoing um work workflow and how these um measures can be built into that. So like having base having baseline things like the lowhanging fruit like I described like images is a an obvious one. Reviewing your CI/CD pipeline and seeing some things that that crop up. If somebody tries to introduce something to a code base maybe we can try and identify that and flag that early. Dashboards that maybe alert to you things that are happening in your web estate that you're not aware of and getting the data to to raise those things. Constantly looking at content auditing or content pruning. um template refactors um a a media strategy maybe ask your what your your media strategy what where are you hosting your videos you know these are questions that may be worth asking I don't know but I know in the university what we're doing but in general it may be worth asking that question if your if your business is video rich it may be worth asking well where are you videoing hosting your videos and what strategy do they have for long-term uh sustainability And of course a hosting review and reporting that and trying to understand how green is your hosting provider and how receptive are they to making the changes to make ongoing efforts to more sustainable hosting. Uh I promised you a workshop. Now I did this last year and I can assure you I'll tell you what happened. People were very nice and people polite and then my memory was is that 90% of the audience stood up and left. So, I'm not offended at all because the people who stayed were the best. They were the ones who were committed to the cause. They wanted to know more. They wanted to engage in dialogue with their fellow Drupal Drupalistas. And it was for the best. Those who went on, I didn't I wasn't offended. It's a busy time. Drupalcon's a very busy organization. I'm glad you made it this far to be brilliantly honest and very grateful. So, as the game host presenter says, just a bit of fun. Nothing serious, just a bit of fun. Um, it's a bit informal. Do you feel to have a little discussion and basically say what what um what align changes could somebody make on your your web estate? What could you do in the next 30 days to look at this? What budget numbers could you track and optimize on your sites? H what third parties? It's more just to have a discussion and say, well, what could be doing with our existing websites and see what we could do based upon what we've been talking about today uh to maybe improve and my experience was that to improve awareness amongst the people that you're working with that you'll have teams in differently. You'll have developers, you'll have hosting, you'll have um product, you'll have content, you'll have communications. It's having conversations with your teams where you're able to actually talk to each other and actually kind of cross reference and say, well, if different teams are able to do their thing and come together, it starts a dialogue. And I certainly know at the University of Edinburgh that's been the most um I would imagine the legacy of what's happened with the sustainable internships is that it's really provoked a dialogue where people have really engaged with this across a whole um suede of the departments and and the and the the post holders and I think that's it's to create that discussion amongst it and then ideally something to take back to your teams and your people and be able to discuss with them how can we take this forward in in our approach kind of as to how we're we're taking forward our web strategy. So that's the idea. If anyone's still here in 10 15 minutes, we can do a little wrap up and maybe type up some notes, but we're nearly done. I know it's busy. I know Drupal Con's busy, so you have to go. I'm not offended, but it'd be great if you hung around and we can maybe sort of like exchange some ideas after 10 minute. Um, and you probably deserve a break from me anyway. So there you go. Choose a friend. It's okay. [Applause] [Music] because I think most important people like Yeah, I thought it >> okay because I also thought it's interesting because It's actually a problem for you. >> Yeah. I mean I know of course they every time you you take they always tell you of course but it's I think like it's their format. Yeah. I mean but there's a context I think I mean not >> Yeah. But I mean I forgot to I'm taking advantage of >> Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. really close. >> I have at the end of the day. Yeah, but I mean what I also when all it's like at least for we have quite actually I mean we use well we are also a lot of Yeah, we won't >> I think [Music] [Music] Yeah. One more confidence. How to deal? It's cold. force. >> I mean, I mean like page like how much No, I mean yeah because I'm not I'm not really but I mean normally the page itself is usually I mean very little as far as I normally I mean it's yeah exactly but I mean Yeah, I mean I thought having a lot of Yeah. limiting creativity is also like in the context of accessibility I mean the people sometimes cannot even use the right. So yeah, I don't maybe it's also a different I thought about >> Yeah, the Google tech manager we have them everything loaded and I mean we have some uh all types we have some we have third party scripts like for example I mean I mean kind of like an it but we have like also data privacy. We have some forms that are loaded from it's like a form and you can put a lot of work like Yeah, it's true. I don't know. >> Happens for you. I mean it depends on you know because I mean on this social media you can interact with them like they can which gives them a kind of like I don't want fake but they can I mean they can also interact on your [Music] >> Yeah. Okay. But something >> Yeah. But at the moment we have educated. I forgot. This is where Hi. Sorry. I appreciate that people are probably wanting to leave very soon. So, what I'd try and do is I'll just try and have a quick um maybe like on little groups if somebody could grab a microphone from every group and maybe just sort of give a kind of summary of what you've just been discussing and just share with everybody about okay well the kind of things doesn't just kind of overview of the kind of things you were discussing there about some of the ideas. If somebody wants to grab the microphone and just have a little um just to kind of summarize some of the things you're talking about, you won't be judged. I promise >> sitting here, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> We were discussing a bit about webp if it's a little bit a contradiction to to open source because it's a good deployment and I personally recommended using a instead because it's even smaller. Yeah, we were also talking about third party scripts a bit. Yeah, accessibility of course, but nothing too specific. >> And it's it's good. I was I was learning something to do this. So, I didn't actually know about the status between the the the concerns about the license between WEBP and uh AI. I didn't actually know that to be honest, but that's interesting. It's interesting. I I again I'm not an expert in this stuff. My understanding is is that from Drupal 11 onwards they're going to make efforts to try and bring more >> a it's even smaller so >> yeah as I say I know it's not quite that straightforward but I know that again this idea of the Drupal train tracks is that by bringing in these changes and you're on the framework you can take advantage of that I know it's not quite that straightforward but it's interesting and I will admit I didn't actually know the sort of subtleties about them so I'll need to go and look that up but that is interesting to know about that but let's continue differences the organizations who back up the different >> I don't >> and I do apologize could you I do apologize could you also repeat his question so it goes in the microphone because they're not appear in the recording >> he wanted me to point out the differences between the formats I don't know exactly but I know that aith is supported by more companies and essentially is by >> okay my my I know I know nothing but my understanding is that ath is not entirely supported fully yet It's I I don't really know. I might I might have to look >> Internet Explorer something. >> Yeah. Well, well, you never know. There's You'd be surprised. There'll be somebody out there telling me that they're still on Internet Explorer 8. And there may be reasons for that. Okay. >> There may be reasons. Yeah. But they are used to websites like >> this is a interesting discussion that we'll have to take. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah, >> we also spoke about webp and but we also pointed out that um public organizations and governments are more interested in those topics than private companies. So like for example in France uh those this kind of clients just already comes to us to to talk about these topics and and want um websites sustainable websites and and there are people who audit websites at the well um the French governments for for for instance whereas it's more you have to to to be more u pedagogical with private companies and it's tougher to to to achieve to make them accept that the website might be should be sustainable. >> I completely agree with you that because I work for a public sector organization. I work for a public sector university. My world is completely different to someday in the private sector. I mean I can only talk about the United Kingdom but I can the European accessibility act is meant to it's still too early. It's too too early the days, but the I think that's going to shake up certain sectors in the European Union. Whereas in Britain, public sector versus private sector, there's just a gulf of difference between people like me who have no choice. I have to care about the accessibility guidelines and and increasingly sustainability because that's been an effort within the university, a big effort trying to talk to people in the private sector. Again, a different Yeah. A different conversation. Some clients in the private sector told me that I didn't need accessibility because they didn't they didn't have uh visited needed accessibility. I I I'm I hear you. In some ways I'm I'm lucky in some ways that because of my employer I'm forced. I have no choice. I have to think almost daily about the WA 2.2A. Whereas in certain parts of the private sector and I'm sorry to say this even in Britain I'm a bit I'm personally very disappointed that the efforts that have gone in the European Union the British government because we left the European Union which was a mistake but let's not cover um but it was uh and um so we're I see what's happening with the European accessibility act and although it's not perfect there's really some great efforts in it early days we don't have that similar push currently the in the United Kingdom and sadly to say because the the the legislation that I fall under the public sector body accessibility regulations that was European legislation originally and we inherited that that we are not taking it further and I'm saddened about that and it it's it's actually some something I'm very angry about to be honest is that the British government at this time are not pressing ahead in the way that I think the European Union are pressing ahead and we're not or at least it's the sentiment of it that's the thing that whether the reality or not is the sentiment and I'm personally quite upset about that. There are people, sorry, you've got me started off. There are people, well, there's one particular company, there's one particular company that really made me angry, but let's try not to go there. There's a particular company in Britain that, and I'm slightly on the outside of this, but I don't mind saying that. As far as I could tell, they have fired their accessibility team. They're a financial services company, and as far as I can tell from the outside, they have fired their accessibility team. and their website last time I looked still said we have a leadership team. We have an accessibility team. We have a leadership accessibility team. They fired them. It's still in the website and they still are virtue signaling there to this. And so there's I'm afraid um I was the point I'm trying to make is that I was forced and I'm quite glad I was forced. I was forced to recognize accessibility through my role. And I've I've been hearing these financial service companies and other companies who've been talking a good game for several years and how proud they are of their team and how proud and then of course when things get tough for people financially, they're the first out. Have you noticed that they're the first out of the building and so um sorry that was a rant but I don't care because it does make me really angry and I'm afraid to say that the reason people like me paid attention because I wasn't perfect five six years ago. I wasn't perfect, but the reason people like me paid attention because it was the law and I had no choice. And we had a we've got the Cabinet Digital and Data Office in Britain that are actively looking at us. They they are we we're not paranoid. We know they're looking at our website. So, it's enforcement. And I'm sorry, that's how you get people's attention. And that's why I'm subtly trying to say that I'm I mean, I'm an optimist, but I'm not going to pretend it's going to happen anytime soon. In the same way that people like me are forced to pay attention to the web content accessibility guidelines, this draft could be for web sustainability guidelines, this could be a pathway that a lot of public sector and other organizations may have to follow. Certainly University of Edinburgh, that's what we're doing and I think it's going to be increasingly the case for other sectors. So I'm an optimist. Sorry, rant's over for now. Sorry. Thank you so much for and and just just a bit smaller. >> So we're a bit looking at how in our companies uh who is doing the accessibility testing, what can we get out of it, can we get more out of it? Um I also talked about uh videos. I work for public public employment sector farmers. Um um and like there's lots of content on our website which is about what we do and those videos have to be absolutely accessible. Uh some educational videos are still on there because they're very useful for schools or for other people but not everything is already accessible. So that's still a lot of work to be done. >> But for the website itself like our internet is very well tested because you have colleagues working at help desk and they need to do it and it's really fun seeing them testing it together and seeing oh but I have no problem with this because I need that tool and you can use this tool and then they decide oh this one you have to repair it and this one you use that tool. So it's like really >> working on it together. >> That's true. That's really good to hear. I' I'm because I've heard anecdotally, I've not actually visited them, but I've got a couple of organizations that I've heard of. Um Google have accessibility sort of labs. I think um they used to have them around the world and they had one in London. I've not been to it yet, but I've heard about them. And I think there are certain other companies that do sort of these kind of accessibility labs in in house and people are empathy labs and things. And I think Sky Scanner is also a name that comes to mind as well. So there's some >> we do have a user testing, but in testing we don't need a lab. >> We need a computer and and a way to get them together and >> grab a coffee and just sit around and talk and do and >> Excellent. >> It's quite low low tech. >> No, no, but that's as you say user testing. Absolutely. bigger. >> So I uh came from a big pharma company international large one. So we are taking care of uh 68 large national websites and uh even in this not or not even in this sector uh there is a big push on accessibility really big push big pressure. So right now where we are we are thinking how to we have very not worry but we have aggressive release cycle. We are releasing every two weeks sometimes every week sometimes even like more often. And we are trying to do also the accessibility analysis and evaluation after every every release. And right now we are trying to find a way and we are at the very beginning actually. We are trying to find a way how to watch some trends and how to get it into our uh like CI/CD approach and to be able to do it as much automated way >> with as least human effort at the end. So this is where we are and we are trying to do >> and we are using webp for all images and it's open source. >> Uh it was released by Google in 2010. Uh it's I'm not saying it's better just saying that for our thousands of of images we're using web. Yeah, it's an I mean certainly that's one of the the things that came through from the Edinburgh case study is that the impact it had and of course the the web estate we had. So to be able to make a change like that across I think that's what Billy was saying and that quote I he gave you Billy's the senior web developer um for the university and that's the point is that they were looking for solutions and I think it was this particularly this webp module that was something that they could implement at scale and it made a a massive impact I think that's a huge factor in them the the the kind of level of difference you can make with the right architectural technology approach >> and one thing that uh I'm taking back from here. It was really good thing and I have to check with our business whether we have it or not. I really like the note about uh an optional transcript for videos because sometimes even myself I'm just I don't want to hear something or watch. I just want to read it. So that would be great as an option. Then >> I think you're quite right. It's be it's it's well it's best practice certainly at the university and I think it's meant to be best practice to provide a transcript. Something that I've personally found quite interesting because I was doing um I was doing some reading at some point in this is that I mean you you probably know this already but when it basically um it ultimately if you're in the unfortunate position where you're not able to see or hear then a transcript's really your only hope when you're trying to access a video um because that works with the screen reader and then the screen reader can translate that to brail or something. So again, it's I like the way when the solution comes along that's quite universal that it's a good thing for everybody. And as you say, you might be in a in a really bad mobile reception where basically you want to get an idea of what's going on in the content, but you don't necessarily want the full but so um having that um universal approach, that holistic approach is a good effort, you know. Um we basically discussed um the first topic which was uh what are the changes that we could physically do in the 30 days and we thought about um we had a suggestion about the editorially module which I did not was aware that I could that existed. which uh could add some guard rails for the tutorial which is always a good start. We also suggested them to have more from the from the accessibility point of view to generate um using AI and out text because the out text could force that but also maybe the quality of the out text is is not is not good enough. know so it is better than nothing but it's not good enough so we suggested that but then we created the whole discussion about AI is actually creating problems or actually not or resolving the problems because then you're trying to to save some some energy carbon footprint but you're generating because of the how you do it >> the elephant in the >> elephant inh how you add is to the whole to the to the whole population and but then I think um if you do it responsibly I think there's a lot of um other benefit to to generate um this out text on on using AI know it's better than someone using that >> and the third one um which was the also the webp which we discussed also which is quite interesting even though there's this a little bit of vendor locking and and not so compatibility and it's also something that we would probably try to implement this at least as a first level implementation for the for and then and then the times up. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, that's really I I'm not again I'm not an expert on this. I've heard that there are people working in the particularly with the Drupal CMS. I believe that there there's work going on to implement these um strategies of say that you have a large web estate or large website and you start running Drupal CMS that they're working on automating alt text. I I I think I I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but I did read somewhere that people are working on that. I think in Drupal CMS I'm always careful because I'm I'm a lot more comfortable talking about Drupal core because Drupal core is a much more stripped down straightforward thing. First apparently there is uh the Drupal AI module which you can use it there are like some features from there which one of them is to use the AI to >> that sounds that sounds right um and so I think um so I'm always a little bit cautious as I say that when you start with core you're just got the the core essentials and you can build up from there and as you say with the Drupal AI module probably is part of the Drupal CMS you know you you are able to then take forward those kind of strategies I And as I say the I know that there's as you heard earlier on there's a um you saw the Dre note there's a lot of work in AI. I mean of course everywhere there's AI but there's a lot of work going on in Drupal AI and that's interesting some good some concerning. So it's it's but I've heard about those efforts and I think it's interesting and I've got I try and have an open mind. I mean like you say this could also bring problems that we're not appreciating that what is the cost of these modules if you're using Drupal AI features what's the cost of those and again how do you how do I mean that's the thing we're trying to establish at the university we're trying to do our own models largely to understand so what what is taking place we don't have any data to understand what is it we're doing that we're taking place so um um like what what does it take to analyze an image and then translate into what does that actually involved in terms of energy usage. Those are the kind of I'm not saying we're doing that but that's the long-term thing of well what's the so it's a trade-off and but at the same time there's definitely serious people who are very interested in these Drupal AI efforts to try and do automated text and there's some serious people I remember um there's a guy called Mike Gford I think he wrote um um he's an accessibility expert he's a Drupal accessibility expert and he was talking very positively about that area so I I try and have an open mind and I think it's trying I was just struck with how although I'm open-minded to AI, I'm just struck how there is a nice the sustainability and accessibility do seem to dovetail and overlap quite nicely sometimes. There's some nice crossovers there and I do see that as potential work. So in thank you for that. Um I think I really appreciate your time. I know that time is ticking. I'm really just wanting to say finally that so just some takeaways about accessibility and performance by default measure publish improve align with the open web values and start this month but iterate you know have it make it an ongoing effort that's built in and baked into your workflows you know something because as I say the danger is that people just walk away and it stops happening if you build it into your workflows in your organization it continues on for the next generation I suppose um just thank you so much don't worry about the appendex That's I'm putting these slides up. If you're if you're if you're if you're still interested, I will put the slides up on on the website. So, they'll be on the they'll be on the Drupal con website pretty soon. Um, I just want to thank you very much. Um, if you want to be kind, I do have a QR code if you want to submit any feedback, but otherwise, I really appreciate you hanging in there. I know it's a long talk and I'll let you go and do enjoy the rest of this week. It's going to be great and I really appreciate your time today. So, thank you. Thank you. It was a great session Q&A. I've got some really interesting feedback there. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much., Accessibility, Sustainability and the Open Web, YouTube, 01k9ysr950eqg0hdd182vfsz75.