Episode 21: Screen Reader Insights, Accessibility Bug Bounties & AI Agent Barriers

Mark Miller (00:06)
Hey, welcome to the Accessibility Breakdown. I am Mark, and this is

Justin Stockton (00:10)
Justin.

Mark Miller (00:12)
every week we pay tribute to those who stand out to us as leading by accessibility by picking three topics that strike us in some way. This week we’re gonna talk about Screen Reader User Survey # 11 results. In this sort of stark title here is actually a really cool survey by WebAIM that we’ll go through.

The next thing will be Why does big tech not run Accessibility bug bounties? by Chris Yoong? And finally, If You Block My AI Agent, You Block Me by Taylor.

Justin Stockton (00:50)
Art.

Mark Miller (00:51)
Arndt. How would you say that, Justin? Arndt.

Justin Stockton (00:54)
Aren’t aren’t?

Mark Miller (00:58)
so let’s start with a survey, Justin.

Justin Stockton (01:01)
Yeah.

Mark Miller (01:02)
So WebAM does all these wonderful surveys all the time.

And

Justin Stockton (01:07)
Seems that’s all they do is just surveys.

Mark Miller (01:09)
they they do a lot more than surveys, but they have probably been the longest and most consistent supply of interesting surveys, right? And when you look at this survey, it’s it it kind of admits like hey, there there could be some biases and it’s not entirely perfect, but this is how we came up with the data and this is what it said. And it said some interesting things. So I’m gonna turn it over

Justin Stockton (01:32)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mark Miller (01:33)
to you.

To

start the discussion on

Justin Stockton (01:37)
Yeah.

Mark Miller (01:38)
survey number eleven.

Justin Stockton (01:40)
I think with this one, one of the more interesting ones that I was kind of curious about was I know every year when they do these surveys, one of the things that they look at is who how do you know if you’re doing a if you’re a screen reader user and you are taking this survey, and the survey is targeted at screen reader users

Mark Miller (02:02)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (02:02)
specifically, what do how do you consider yourself proficient with a screen reader?

Are you you know average? Are you advanced? Are you you know new to it? and then they also look at other interesting things like what screen readers do you use? Are you using them on are you using mobile screen readers? what happens if how do you typically navigate on a page? And so there’s all these great questions and things. So we get a little bit of insight into how a let’s say a subset of the screen reader.

user folks out there. My the words just went out of my mouth. yeah.

Mark Miller (02:45)
People people who are screen reader

users or native screen reader users, you can pick from one of those two. Yeah.

Justin Stockton (02:51)
Yeah. Native screeners. That’s a good way of that’s the way I was trying to say it.

but you get all these you get all this information and I know earlier this year there was a there was an issue a lot of kind of lot of comments, a lot of pushback, a lot of feedback through the National Federation of for the Blind, NFB, on some changes that Vispero the

company behind JAWS had made around the pricing model, the subscription model for JAWS. So one of the things that I was really curious about is where was JAWS going to end up now? Like were we going to start to see a shift of people at during the screen reader survey that had started to move over to some of the alternatives like NVDA on Windows or Narrator? or is was JAWS still gonna kind of command that that lead that it had always had?

and for the most part, we’re still seeing a lot of people still relying on JAWS. one of the more interesting data points that was in here that I thought was really cool was that let’s see, where was it? There’s so much data in here, like you just kind of like you start reading and it’s like it’s like reading Wikipedia articles before you go. Yeah, go ahead.

Mark Miller (04:08)
Well we’ll look for that and let me and I’ll just comment on what you just said because

you that was so I had the same reaction. That was one of the most interesting things to me is that that this time last year there really was a pretty big like you I think you downplayed it a little bit, Justin, right? Like the the National Federation of the Blind was was called Vespero out very directly and specifically and a couple of times, on the premise that they raised particularly the

sort of single user price of JAWS and this is something that that folks rely on. And I believe in sort of that same breath, they even talked about the improvements in narrator. So for me, I was very interested to see the same thing you were. Like how does JAWS compare to narrator or or you know, is did it did that impact the the the use of JAWS at all? And

The use of JAWS actually went up a little bit and narrator

Justin Stockton (05:08)
Yeah. Love it.

Mark Miller (05:09)
stayed flat. And if you continue to read through the survey, one of the things that sort of cites that seems to be a phenomenon is that people

stick with the screen reader they’re familiar with, which is in most cases JAWS. So it really, even something as strong as that didn’t seem to have the power to actually move folks off of JAWS that were familiar the with and wanted to continue to use JAWS. Now I I guess that still leaves a question of like

Are there sort of future or budding or you know, people who are less set in their ways, users that still are bubbling up, where that might happen, who knows, right? But I kind of expected to see a shift, not an a not an increase in the use of JAWS. I expected to see it shift down, but that’s not what happened.

Justin Stockton (06:07)
Yeah.

One of the the stat that I was particularly interested in was the f free or low cost screen readers versus commercial

Mark Miller (06:15)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (06:16)
screen readers stat. and this seventy-four point six percent of the respondents said that yes, they think that a free or low-cost screen reader is just as good as a commercial screen reader.

Just about three quarters of all the respondents. what’s interesting about that is that they, because WebAim has the data, they can look at these kind of sub-slices. But only

Mark Miller (06:45)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (06:46)
61.9% of JAWS of the JAWS users, the people that said that JAWS is my primary screen reader, said yes to this. And so

Mark Miller (06:55)
Right.

Justin Stockton (06:57)
that’s compared to 91% of users who use voiceover, NVDA, some other.

screen readers basically something other than one of the commercial things. so basically if you are already using these alternative screen readers, you believe in them. Like you are out there and you think that these are a great alternative to something that’s commercial. But if you’re still if the commercial screen readers are your your your daily driver, so to speak, you’re

Mark Miller (07:25)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (07:26)
skeptical. I’d love to have seen that 61% broken down a little bit more into

into across some of the other demographics and and pieces of data that they had. That’s so

Mark Miller (07:38)
I think it’s a non screen reader user if you’re looking for a way to relate to this, right? It’s to me it’s very similar to like the Microsoft suite, right? Where if you get into business, you’re used to using Word, you’re used to using Excel, and then all of a sudden people are like, go use Google Docs, go use this other thing, or you you get you get like Ubuntu, right? And you wanna download that. What what’s that kind of office?

I can’t remember, but there’s some sort of like office equivalent open source thing. And they all may like Google Docs is very good. And there’s probably I don’t even know if it’s I know it in in the past I found out not to be as feature rich. There’s some things that you can’t do with it, or or maybe not. Maybe I’m just used to what Word can do. And when I try to do it in Google Docs, it doesn’t work the same way. So I miss out on it. But

It’s so because of the familiarity, it is so difficult to get people to switch or to switch. And there’s a lot of reasons possible, you know, to to switch in in all of these or not to switch, you know, in all of these different circumstances. So I think that that’s what I would relate it to most is just for me, not because of any loyalty, because of anything else, but if I wanna get into a document, I’m probably gonna pop open word because that is what I’ve been using since I’ve

can remember. The other interesting thing, and I can’t remember if the survey said this outright or if it’s just something I kind of noticed as I was going through the data. So take this with a grain of salt. But it looked like there was a socioeconomic factor associated with using screen free screen readers as well. It seemed like countries where maybe they d didn’t quite have the resources that we do here in the US seem to

adopt narrator because it comes free with the operating system or something like NVDA, some screen reader that was didn’t didn’t have a a cost associated with it. So I don’t know if that’s kind of that you put a value on it and people think it’s more valuable. You know,

Justin Stockton (09:56)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Miller (09:56)
like that the if it’s free, it’s a throwaway or you know, you throw about and then so if you have the means you you buy the thing that you can pay for.

I don’t know if there’s a little bit of that mental factor in there as well. And I would say, you know, JAWS people do pay for JAWS. JAWS is supported. If you’re a business, it’s very difficult to adopt N VDA because you don’t necessarily have the same support behind it as you do a a a paid product. And it’s a mission critical application for many people who rely on a screen reader to do their job.

So there’s a lot of factors like that that could go into sort of the stickiness of that solution. And I think there’s answers to it out there a little bit, but not not ones that have been around since what’s Jost for Window was nineteen ninety five, I think. You know. Yeah.

Justin Stockton (10:48)
Yeah. Yeah, they just hit what forty years.

Thirty years. What did we get the pins for two years ago?

Mark Miller (10:57)
I have one of those pens.

Justin Stockton (10:58)
Yeah.

Mark Miller (10:59)
right here. Hang on.

Justin Stockton (11:00)
So thirty years? Yeah, I think it was thirty years.

Mark Miller (11:02)
This is the for those of you who yeah, thirty years. That’s two years ago. for those of you who who can see the video or are looking at the video, I’m holding up the pen, which looks like a two and a quarter in pen it’s like a lapel pen, but it’s a two and a quarter floppy disc that says JAWS thirty year anniversary, and then it has that same thing and braille underneath it. And Vespero gave those out a couple of years ago, at Seesawn and probably other places as well. So it’s pretty cool, pretty impressive.

And certainly has earned the right to be a the premiere premier solution out there, to have been around and been of service for that many years.

Justin Stockton (11:44)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean it’s it’s this great read great great screen reader.

Mark Miller (11:51)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (11:52)
and the extensibility of it is really fantastic. but it is it’s really interesting to see some of these newer screen readers like NVDA, narrator, the really starting to add a s a lot of those features and and

Mark Miller (12:09)
Yeah.

Justin Stockton (12:10)
going beyond just

reading what’s, you know, in in the web or on the desktop, but actually incorporating some of these additional this additional functionality.

Mark Miller (12:19)
I would actually like to see a blog post or something from a native screen reader user.

Comparing or talking about narrator, which is the one that comes free on Windows, today versus several years ago, because it really had a reputation for being minimal. And I think, from what I understand, that that’s changing. so it would be, you know, we could be any JAWS user or anything, but to go in there and and somebody who is familiar with old narrator and is can grab the new narrator and see how it’s changed would be really interesting.

Justin Stockton (12:56)
Yeah, it was almost like it was it was almost like IE eleven where it was it was just good enough to be useful to get in and download the software that you really wanted. So you could switch to to JAWS or N V D A or Chrome or Firefox or whatever, so

Mark Miller (13:13)
I think w one of the things that we’ve learned too I’ve learned, I should say, and and maybe it’s the same experience for you, and some of these articles that we’ve read, and I’m not gonna be able to remember, like I did like I did what we what the who wrote it and what it was, but we w read an article by a screen reader user, reviewed an article by a screen reader user last episode, episode twenty, I believe it was, it was nineteen or twenty.

And it really gave me some insight on how a screen reader user sort of goes back to the same page, starts to understand the page, develops workarounds, you know, all those kind of kind of things. It would really be interesting to talk to a screen reader user and and kind of get that day in a life, like what’s important, you know, what kinds of things show up in JAWS that maybe don’t show up elsewhere that really makes life easier. What is

You know, what is kind of fancy whistles and bells that aren’t necessary and all that kind of stuff. Like it’s one thing as a sighted person to be able to use a screen reader, and I am not a great screen reader user. I think you’re quite a bit better of a one than I am, Justin. And I’ve known sighted people that can really use screen readers, but that’s different than relying on it every day and sort of knowing what like this is non negotiable. I need this.

I can’t have that. Now that I have this, right? Now that I have this, I think of like picture smart for JAWS. Now that I have this, I don’t ever want to go without it again. Right. Like what are those what are those features? Like when they showed up, it was just like this is the way it’s going to be from now on. I can’t give it up. So, anyways, very interesting survey. it’s it’s you know, survey doesn’t inspire a lot of emotion and excitement. I understand.

But if you’re if you’re in the industry, I I think, and it’s not wasn’t a very difficult read, like you could skim through this and just kind of collect some some really interesting data points. So I was super happy to be able to do that and really happy that WebAim continues to give us this type of insight. So a huge shout out to them. I think a lot of people pick this kind of thing up and spin it off into other content.

That’s really useful. So WebAim has been just tried and true for putting some real numbers out there that people can work with for a lot of reasons. Okay. Any any other thoughts? Or you let’s j why don’t we why don’t we jump to talking about what happens when a screen reader runs across some difficulties, what we would consider to be bugs.

Bugs

that affect people with disabilities, people using assistive technologies, on a website, right? that can be a complete showstopper, that can be cause difficulties as we know, but those bugs can also be difficult to find. So Chris Yoong wrote an article, a speculative article that says, Why doesn’t big tech, why does big tech not run accessibility?

Bug bounties.

Before we even get into this, and I know I said this to you before we heated up the mics, Justin, but I’m gonna share it with everybody. I have to admit I’ve never heard of a bug bounty of any kind. So I was like, this is kind of cool, right? And to imagine all

Justin Stockton (16:52)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Miller (16:53)
these dog Dog the Bounty Hunters with their spray bottles full of mace running around trying to find accessibility bugs, that’s a pretty that’s pretty, pretty cool thought.

But this is exactly what it sounds like.

Justin Stockton (17:05)
That imagery like, well, what happened if

you threw this into a like AI and like generate for me an image? It’s like, Dog the Bounty Hunter.

Mark Miller (17:13)
Dog the Bounty Hunter the bountying for accessibility bugs. Yeah, that might be is as much as we don’t want to waste cycles on AI, that just might be worthwhile, right? so this is exactly what it sounds like. And for those of you who are like me, they’re like bug bounties. I never even heard of those. It’s literally companies that say, Hey, if you find a bug on our website, we’ll give you a couple dollars.

And in some cases, I think there was some stories about it being a thousand bucks or whatever. Like it’s can be a significant bounty at times, I guess, but they literally pay the public for reporting bugs and issues found on a website or an application that that the company creates. And if they verify it’s a bug and fix it, they pay out whatever the bounty amount is. Yes.

Justin Stockton (18:09)
Now one constraint I would put on

Mark Miller (18:09)
You look like you want to say something that I s miss am I not understanding this?

Justin Stockton (18:13)
that is that typically bug bounty programs are focused on security bugs. they’re not

Mark Miller (18:21)
okay.

Justin Stockton (18:22)
it’s not just like, hey, we misspelled something on the page. Here’s a thousand dollars. it’s it’s more

Mark Miller (18:29)
And

Justin Stockton (18:30)
going in try white hat hackers trying to find exploits on a site.

before others do reporting it in so to privately and discreetly so that the big tech company can then fix the issue, address the issue, release a patch for it.

Mark Miller (18:52)
So White Hat Hacker is a hacker doing good.

Justin Stockton (18:56)
Yes. So there’s so there’s typically three

Mark Miller (18:58)
He lives a a hacker

that lives in the in the Justice League. Not in the what was the opposite of that? The something of the something of doom.

Justin Stockton (19:06)
I don’t know. I Batman’s in the Justice

League and I wouldn’t put a white hat on him. Yeah.

Mark Miller (19:11)
Batman? Yes,

but the Batman of the Justice League, yes. The Batman

Justin Stockton (19:16)
Yeah.

Mark Miller (19:16)
of the movies, the Ben the Ben Affleck Batman. not so much.

Justin Stockton (19:21)
Yes. But yeah, like the white

hat the white hat hacker is someone who is who has the ability to perform security audits, who who can can perform hacking and tech has hacking techniques and ha things in their repertoire and is using that typically for good, kind of going back to the old westerns where there was the the evil guy and the black hat, those would be your black

Mark Miller (19:48)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (19:49)
hat hackers, or the white hat.

guy in your wearing a white hat.

Mark Miller (19:53)
Very thankful

to spy versus spy for me to be able to understand who the good spy was and the bad spy was based on. Yep.

Justin Stockton (19:57)
Also a good analogy. Yep, spy versus spy use that.

So but that’s where it comes from.

Mark Miller (20:05)
Well

so that is that’s I’m learning here ’cause it doesn’t say or what I read it didn’t say security bug bounties. They did mention security bugs, but it’s interesting for me to understand that really the bounties were only paid for security bugs. They weren’t paid for other other little bugs,

Justin Stockton (20:22)
general modes.

Mark Miller (20:23)
general bugs. so let me ask you a question then, Justin, and that you may or may not know the answer to. Could people make

a

living or a good s supplementary income by being a white hat hacker? By being a the good Okay. So you literally could just sit there and spend your day like I’m gonna I’m gonna try to hack into this website, that website and report it, collect your bounties and

Justin Stockton (20:47)
I would have said

before Mythos and Fable came out from Claude or Astra came out from OpenAI, I would have said that would have been you yeah, you would have there would be you know a couple of big ones every year. And sometimes they make the

Mark Miller (21:03)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

Justin Stockton (21:04)
the news in kind of the security circles of hey, you know, so and so, you know, Google paid out this much last quarter in bug bounties.

And so that would be kind of a big release. Now that those models have been those newer frontier models have been released, I think it’s getting it’s gonna be really hard out there. So if you were if you if this was your kind of your your way of making a living, you’re probably looking for something else to do now.

Mark Miller (21:35)
Yep. You and a few other people probably who

Justin Stockton (21:38)
Yeah.

Mark Miller (21:39)
no longer do what they do because of the AIs. so this is in in and this is really it folks, right? Like Chris Yoong just essentially said, Hey, this seemed to be a good model and catch a lot of I now know security bugs. why not do the same thing for accessibility? It’s a very interesting

Concept. And I think the one thing I really like about it is that even if you’re doing like most companies, just to be sort of honest, right? Most companies stop at the technical conformance audit. So an audit that determines how they technically conform to WCAG 2.2 level AA, whatever. And

If

they do a really good job of remediating issues found in an audit like that, they are amongst sort of the top folks that are addressing accessibility. So what you don’t get then is a lot of organizations stepping beyond that and really getting good user feedback. This could be a way to solicit that kind of feedback without doing formalized

studies and and have something that’s ongoing and that’s gonna also maybe catch changes that happen, and you might find bugs and things that occur a little quicker because people are looking at it all the time. So it’s just a very interesting concept and it was kind of kinda fun for for that to be thrown out there and to think about.

Justin Stockton (23:22)
Yeah. I think I think the idea has merit. I don’t think it’s quite as easy to implement an accessibility bounty program.

Mark Miller (23:32)
Yeah.

Justin Stockton (23:32)
so similar to the way security bugs are tracked, because with security bugs, it’s it’s when you’re it’s it’s typically a it’s it’s very bullion. It’s either you’re able to exploit that identify that vulnerability and show how you exploit it.

And pass that information on in a reproducible manner. But with accessibility, you’re right, there’s the the there’s the the conformance aspects. But even for the conformance things, you you get two different accessibility professionals in a room and one’s gonna

Mark Miller (24:08)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (24:09)
say it’s this failure, and one of them’s gonna say it’s this failure. So there’s not that there’s art to it, but we’re dealing with when you’re dealing with humans.

And how humans interpret information,

Mark Miller (24:22)
That’s a good point.

Justin Stockton (24:23)
there’s some there’s there’s wiggle room there. And so I think any type of bounty program would need to try to put a constraint on that,

Mark Miller (24:33)
Right.

Justin Stockton (24:34)
or else you’re gonna get that information passed on and a developer’s not gonna know how to interpret it. or what happens if they get conflating? Yeah, what happens if they get conflating once? Who wins?

Mark Miller (24:41)
Yep, somebody’s gonna say yes, it’s a bug, somebody else is gonna say no, who’s right, who’s wrong, what do we do? Yeah, who wins?

Justin Stockton (24:49)
So I think that I think that’s where the challenge

Mark Miller (24:50)
And there’s no referees.

Justin Stockton (24:52)
for that would be.

Mark Miller (24:54)
Yep, there’s no bug bounty referees.

They don’t exist. They probably should. All right.

Justin Stockton (24:57)
Yeah. So now I do have

an idea there, but maybe we take that offline and see if we can figure

Mark Miller (25:05)
Ye Yeah. There you go. Right. It’s not

Justin Stockton (25:09)
out an a a a way to maybe have a be a centralized location for accessibility bugs that do

Mark Miller (25:17)
Or to find

some to find some boundaries or something like that. Yeah. It’s a

Justin Stockton (25:20)
Yeah, it put some boundaries up. So

Mark Miller (25:22)
interesting It’s interesting and I think I had the same reaction when I read this article as you is it wasn’t like, here’s a thing, let’s go do it. It was like, this is an interesting idea and then it’s you know, scratching the head and starting to think, how would you implement something like this? How would you start to think about boundaries? Like and that’s what I like about the article is that it’s kind of a like it’s not like here’s what you should do. It’s sort of like, why don’t we do this?

And then it and then it sparks that thought, I think, out there in the world so that people can sit back and go, Yeah, why don’t we do this and how would we do this? Right.

Well, why don’t we move from things that bugs on websites, right? Things that stop screen readers. See, look, I’m you know, you wanted segues, Justin. Come on. And let’s talk about what happens when you block somebody unintentionally because you’re trying to stop AI agents. And that brings us to Taylor.

Arn’s

article, if you block my I if you block my AI agent, you block me. So Taylor’s clearly a screen reader user, right? relies on assistive technology and relies on now on AI agents to help him her, sorry, to help her

really consume things on the web and I think the big example was Amazon. And Amazon for a lot of right reasons, which Taylor admits decid is is try is blocking agents, right? Well, because it because there’s a potential I think that yeah, would

Justin Stockton (27:20)
Right reasons.

Mark Miller (27:23)
It was well, we wanna I mean I think we want to stay neutral with that. And Taylor did a very good job of kind of staying neutral to that. Like, yeah, this it wasn’t like this malicious list block agents. It was like, hey, wait a minute, this is not working out great for us and some other people, and you know, there’s a couple of kind of reasons there. But like so many business decisions, it really happened in a silo and knee-jerk.

Justin Stockton (27:49)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Miller (27:50)
And the big point here is hey.

This is this is like one of the just a fantastic nothing about us without us example. If Taylor makes the point that if they just if if they ask people with disabilities, if there was somebody with disabilities in the room that could have said, Hey, I’m here helping you make these decisions. This is something you need to think about, that the decision could have been very, very different. and the ask is is that that

You reach out to Amazon and say, Hey, can you think about changing this policy so that people with disabilities who kind of and it was a very interesting sort of visual that Taylor laid out here? It’s like, I’m here and I’m bringing my agent. It was almost like the physical example of this in my head that popped into my head was like, Yeah,

Justin Stockton (28:42)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Miller (28:42)
no pets allowed unless your pet’s a duck guide dog. Right?

Justin Stockton (28:47)
Yeah.

Mark Miller (28:48)
Then you and the dog are allowed through the front door. And it was kind of a similar thought here, like, yeah, no pets allowed, no agents allowed, unless I’m a person with a disability who relies on this agent for an equivalent ex experience. Please allow me to bring mine through the through the door and and have a a tightly controlled and appropriate policy for that.

Justin Stockton (29:13)
It’s

Mark Miller (29:13)
And I’m gonna be quiet

so that you can

Justin Stockton (29:17)
No, no, it’s it’s it’s really interesting. Like Taylor is a Taylor’s a very technical person. they do a lot of software, they do they’re a software developer, they build a lot of interesting tools, they’ve been in AI, they’re right there, like talking about AI and software development from the perspective of someone who is blind and who relies on a screen reader to do everything.

Mark Miller (29:44)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (29:46)
and so

their her approach to like this article is really interesting because like yes she acknowledges the you know that Amazon has every right to you know to s to stop the agents from from entering their store but at the same time it’s kind of I don’t know the argument kind of doesn’t hold up. Like it is it’s assuming that whatever agents are coming into their store aren’t you know, don’t have privacy, don’t have security in mind, that these agents just

Mark Miller (30:16)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (30:17)
you know, kind of going in willy-nilly. And but that’s that’s the Pandora’s box that’s been opened. Like and for Amazon to to say like, no, you know, you have to use our agent. I think it’s Rufus is their agent in order to

Mark Miller (30:34)
Rufus, yep.

Justin Stockton (30:35)
to do the to do your shopping. Like that’s that’s not gonna work for everybody.

Mark Miller (30:40)
Yeah,

and Taylor and Taylor said that she does use Rufus, but that it’s sort of limited, it’s not as powerful as I again, you know, this is like it’s so that’s a good if I’m sorry for the interruption here, but that’s that’s the other thing that struck me is that

Taylor

was like, I have my agent. It’s configured the way I want. It’s cool that you have an agent, and I might use yours for some reasons, but this is my agent. And it and it struck me very much like the widget on a website. Like, put this widget on your website so that you can be, you know, in air quotes accessible. Look, it’s got a screen reader, it magnifies, it does all this stuff.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, people with disabilities are going, Yeah, I’ve got my screen reader. It’s configured the way I want it to work. The last thing I want to do, it’d be like asking you, like you you drive into a town and the

Justin Stockton (31:31)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Miller (31:31)
police pull you over and say, Okay, while you’re in town, you have to drive one of our cars. And you’re like, Okay,

Justin Stockton (31:36)
Uh-huh.

Mark Miller (31:37)
that’s great, but the seats not adjusted the way I like it. The you know, the presets on the radio station aren’t mine. The temperature

Justin Stockton (31:44)
Yeah.

Mark Miller (31:44)
controls aren’t the way I like it. I’m not used to the steering.

Like

Justin Stockton (31:48)
Yeah.

Mark Miller (31:48)
can I please just drive my own car? You know?

Justin Stockton (31:51)
Yeah. Well

for me it was the I mean, the very physical example is we have King Supers here in Colorado, which is a Kroger subsidiary district, whatever.

Mark Miller (32:01)
Okay. Grocery store.

Justin Stockton (32:04)
and they’ve got their own online shopping. Like I can go in, I can fill my basket, I can go and pick it up, all those great things. But what about Instacart? That’s like me going to Instacart saying, Hey, I want to buy these things and from King Supers and Instacart showing up at the store, King Super saying,

No, we don’t trust you shopping on someone else’s behalf. We’re not

Mark Miller (32:24)
Mm.

Justin Stockton (32:24)
going to let you into the store. If they want to if they want to buy something through us, you know, digitally, they’re going to have to do it through our.

Mark Miller (32:34)
that they’re not familiar with, that doesn’t not set

Justin Stockton (32:36)
Yeah, that they’re not familiar with.

Mark Miller (32:37)
up the way that they want it to set up, et cetera, et cetera.

Justin Stockton (32:40)
Exactly. And when you say it like that, it’s like, well, that’s dumb. Like why are they does Instacart like the people do the Instacart shoppers do they ever get stopped at a door because they’re Instacart shoppers? Like one, I have no idea. I’ve never used Instacart. Well, I’ve used it once. But yeah, I mean that’s that just sounds silly. So why would you do the same thing for an agent?

Mark Miller (33:07)
And maybe, you know, and and maybe sometimes we have to make these mistakes, realize the mistakes we made. I mean the the the road to success is paved by failure, right? So it’ll be interesting to see Amazon’s reaction to this. And I hope let’s not bury the fact. I know I mentioned it before, but there’s a very specific ask that Taylor has with this article, and that is that you reach out to Amazon. We’re gonna put

Her

article like we always do in in the notes. And if you’re not sure how to do that, that was included in the article. But to reach out to Amazon and say, hey, please don’t, please don’t do this. I’m a person with or people with disabilities rely on their agents. Can you can you figure out how to how to make these exceptions? So it’ll be interesting, particularly if there’s an uptick through the because of this article and maybe because we’re talking about it.

in an outreach to Amazon. You know, for me it’s not not how you fall, it’s how you get up. So it’ll be interesting to see how they how they get up. And if they get up appropriately, I think that they have the opportunity to win over

Justin Stockton (34:20)
So it’s almost our

second Batman reference in this episode.

Mark Miller (34:24)
Did he say that?

Justin Stockton (34:25)
Mm-hmm. Well that’s what Alfred says to him. Why do we fall down? So we can pick learn to pick ourselves back up?

Mark Miller (34:31)
I don’t even know. I checked out a Batman probably right after the Justice League. That’s not true. I watched a few of them. But I haven’t watched any of the recent ones.

Justin Stockton (34:40)
It was in the it was in the Christopher Nola movies.

Mark Miller (34:43)
It was what?

Justin Stockton (34:44)
It was in the Christ it was a quote from one of the one of the Christopher Nola movies. I don’t know if Batman ever said it in any of the dark

Mark Miller (34:47)
No. I think you’re winning

the you’re winning like the geek awards here over me.

Justin Stockton (34:52)
I am,

I am, I’m high I am geeking out today.

Mark Miller (34:56)
Yeah. Well, even

last time I’m like, Look at me, I’m a Trekkie, and then you’re like in episode thirty two

Justin Stockton (35:02)
Yeah.

Mark Miller (35:04)
of th so so and so and th invented the warp drive and I’m like, Okay Yeah, you cracked out you cracked off the name of the dude that

Justin Stockton (35:10)
Yeah. it was Keith’s shirt that had the Star Starfleet.

Mark Miller (35:15)
Yeah, you and you and and Keith were like, This is the guy who invented the warp drive I’m like, How do you know my I have an uncle that would have that if he hears this episode is gonna be disappointed, I didn’t know that. But

Justin Stockton (35:27)
The the one the one last thing that I want to say is it’s gonna be, I think this is gonna be really interesting, this whole Amazon thing. You know,

Mark Miller (35:34)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Stockton (35:35)
come a lot of companies are out there spending a lot of money to incorporate AI into their stuff, whatever that stuff

Mark Miller (35:44)
Right.

Justin Stockton (35:45)
is. And for for fear of being left behind. and

we as we as consumers get to are going to get it to pick which agents we’re going to want to use, whether that’s Muse or Grokbot or Dots from OpenAI. Like whatever personal agent we decide to use, that’s going to be our choice. And so to block like you’re to block those agents from coming in or participating on the web.

that is that gonna be kind of the next kind of AI I don’t wanna say arms race. That’s over drama overly dramatic. But like is that gonna be the next sticking point for AI? Is

Mark Miller (36:31)
Mm.

Justin Stockton (36:31)
gonna be where are we gonna where are we going to allow agents to go and what information are we going to

Mark Miller (36:37)
Yeah. Well, and I think that you just put your finger on it, and that is that we think we understand how all this is gonna work and we’re reacting based on what we’re used to, which is websites and people logging out of websites and surfing websites. And I don’t and so websites are putting up, you know, AI agents. You’ve got your your productivity stack that’s got

Built in AI and I agree with you, AI is becoming this personal thing. What happens when we’re like, no, I want to use my AI, right? Like the car, right?

Justin Stockton (37:18)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Miller (37:19)
We all view it as a bus now. And and but we’re now getting our own personal cars. And how does that change things? So that’s the second car analogy of the day. Sorry, folks, for the multiple

Justin Stockton (37:31)
There you go. One for me.

Mark Miller (37:33)
car analogy.

Justin Stockton (37:34)
Yeah. You geeked out on cars, I geeked out on Batman. It’s cool.

Mark Miller (37:37)
There

you go. All right. Well, interesting group of of articles here and a lot of really I don’t know, this one none of these articles were long and deep, but they were all I’m gonna use the word profound, which is essentially means deep. So sorry for that. But

You know what mean? Like they in their simplicity, they were very profound and they caused some thinking. So thanks to WebAim, thanks to Chris Yoong, thanks to Taylor Arnd for some real thoughtful content. We really appreciate it. Gives us something to

Justin Stockton (38:17)
Yeah.

Mark Miller (38:18)
think about and talk about.

Justin Stockton (38:19)
Yep. Love love love thinking. Don’t stop.

Mark Miller (38:23)
Love thinking.

It’s good. All right. Anything else, Justin?

All right. Well, thank you once again. Now that we have broken accessibility down for you, we hope you go forth and keep it accessible.