Before we actually start, I just want to go off and quickly note the last two sessions
being about AI and their rooms being packed, completely packed standing room only.
We come down to a conversation about accessibility which is ultimately about humans, right?
It's about us, all of us, right?
And sustainability, which is the fucking planet we live on and the room is half full.
So, you know, AI is an exciting thing at all, but really our priorities are a little bit
at a skew here.
This is not how the proportion should be about things that matter in our world.
So I just want to add that little hint.
No pressure.
Exactly.
Okay.
So we can start, whether accessibility and environmental sustainability with popular
CMS by Mike.
Thank you very much.
So thank you all for coming.
So I wanted to give this talk because there's two issues I care a great deal about and I
see there's a lot of overlap between them.
On accessibility, we've made a lot of head roads.
It's really nice to be able to see the kinds of changes that have happened in the last
few years around digital accessibility.
And we're only just starting to think about sustainability.
And so I wanted to go off and have this session here so we can talk about them.
The last two sessions had more technical information.
I'm not going to show you any technical information.
You will not see a terminal here.
I'm here to talk about issues where there will be spaces and times to go off and to
get into the terminal and to get into the technology.
But generally I find that these kinds of presentations are not the best place for that.
So first of all about me.
Mike Gifford, a senior strategist at Civic Actions.
I've been a Drupal developer for 18 years.
I began working on accessibility in 2009.
My assumption at that point was it wouldn't take me that long to go into, to fix the accessibility
problems in Drupal.
Just to let you know, we have not fixed all the accessibility problems in Drupal.
This is a big problem, much bigger than I had thought.
That said, Drupal is still one of the most accessible content management systems out
there.
I've also been involved in promoting open source for a long time.
This isn't only my second time at FOSTIM, but I've been actively involved in promoting
open source now for at least 20 years.
And happy to be able to do this full time with Civic Actions now.
And yeah, I've been able to focus more on accessibility and sustainability here at Civic
Actions because I don't have to worry about HR and planning and all of that sort of stuff.
So I've got deep roots in the Drupal community and that's just one CMS that people here are
using.
We also had a good experience in two years ago with FUNCA, which is an accessibility
group in Sweden.
And with them, what we tried to do was to build a, a cross CMS study of the offering
environment.
How do we try and make sure that offering tools are built to have accessibility built,
how do we try and support authors to create more accessible content?
How do we, we structure that?
And how do we, if we can, looking at the European Accessibility Act and the Web Accessibility
Directive, realizing the huge challenge that was facing the European Union to try and meet
these particular accessibility goals, there was an effort by FUNCA to, to actually try
and bring people together and to set some best practices for supporting authors and actually
to do usability studies with authors to find out what, what we were doing.
And I think it's actually the first, probably the only study using, looking at authors and
engaging authors to say, how do we support authors in producing accessible content?
And that's, that's strange given how many, how many, how much, how many billions of
dollars are spent every year on accessibility and how little money is actually spent on fixing
the problems upstream, either in open source projects like Drupal or supporting the authors
who are creating most of the accessibility issues right now.
So it's, it's an interesting challenge, but that was funded by the European Commission
and it was a great project to be part of and allowed, allowed me to engage with people
with, with PLONE and Type of, was Type of 3 there?
No, Type of 3 was not, but JUMMA was, Umbreco, and again to see that the collaboration through,
through different open source content management systems and some non-open source content management
systems as well.
I do think that a similar process should be happening with web sustainability, partly
because we, we are in a climate crisis.
This is something that we need to act on, all of us.
It has to be something that we're thinking about the, the, how we're managing our, our
technology because although we talk about the cloud, you know, all of the stuff has
real world impacts.
We do have to, to realize that there are, there are atoms, all, atoms behind all of the bits
that we are driving.
And unless we're starting to be more conscious about that, we're not going to be able to
to, to have, we're going to continue to, to exponentially grow the, the, the, our sector,
which will have a lot of environmentally negative consequences.
So I wanted to touch on a couple different platforms, CMSs, and, and what they're doing
around sustainability.
Because this is something that, that I think every, every open source project should do,
not just a matter of the ones that are, are, are content management systems.
I'm only really familiar with the content management system world, because that's the
world that I've been living in.
But, you know, so for Drupal, we have, have a page that is talking about accessibility,
about sustainability.
It is really important to have something on, on, on project websites to say that this is
something that matters to our community.
This is a value of our community.
You know, I've been writing about it and talking about it since 2016.
But again, this is something that, that we need to see this information.
If you don't hear it, reinforce it, and see that action that's happening, people are,
are going to, people aren't necessarily sure how to plug in or how their actions today
affect the sustainability in the future.
There's a Drupal Slack channel on sustainability.
There's also a sustainability statement that is up on the Drupal.org website.
Again, it's not a very bold one, but it's something that, that is a start.
It's a starting point for us to go off and say, this is something that matters for the
Drupal community.
And people need to have that, that starting point to go off and say, how do we, how do
we try and, and get involved, take the next step, realize that our community is having
an impact, both positive and negative in the world.
So I'm trying to, to own as much as we can that responsibility around that.
Is there any WordPress people here?
Excellent.
I like the WordPress sustainability folks.
Like I like what is being done in that space.
They've got a strong community.
There's a lot of sustainability people who are engaged in, in both the Slack channel
as well as in, in, in broader thought leadership, whether it's Tim Frick with Mighty Bites in
Chicago or Tom Greenwood in, with Whole Green Digital in London.
There's some great, great people in the WordPress space that are pushing sustainability and
helping people engage with it.
So, so yeah, there's, they've got a WordPress initiative and they meet as WordPress does
them on a regular basis through the, the Slack channel and engage on issues that are important
to try and help, help WordPress users go and, and make, make building sustainable websites
more easier for everyone to go off and do.
How much would it matter if WordPress were to go off and reduce its energy efficiency
by 20% if they were able to reduce that by 20% I mean, that's, that's probably like,
I don't know, I mean, like, they're 60% of the web, right?
So how much energy is that?
It's, it's, it would be significant if we could go off and reduce that demand side and,
and think about the data centers, the impact on, on like the, the trickle-on effects to
having 6% of the web be 20% smaller, would be enormous, 20% faster.
If we could think about how, how we're, we're prioritizing our, our structure.
Waitail, another really interesting CMS is doing some great stuff.
Anybody from Waitail?
Okay. So excellent, excellent.
So, I, I think that, that of all the CMS out there,
Waitail is doing the most to try and, and calculate what their impact is.
There's a whole phrase that you've got to, if you don't measure it, it doesn't matter, right?
And so, being able to say, you know, Waitail accounts for 8,240 tons of CO2 per year.
And that's going to grow over year after year, I hope, because we want the Waitail community to go off and grow.
But that's, that's still like 8,000 tons of carbon per year that Waitail's producing.
And, I mean, we hope that the sites are doing good things, but ultimately, it's, it's a,
if they weren't using work, Waitail, they'd be using something else.
And it's so good to go, go off and start measuring this information.
So, yeah, and then they've got good documentation.
There's a, there's a roadmap in place.
It's lovely to go off and, and see that there is, is, is support for authors so that authors again can have the support that they need to go off and, and to create more sustainable products.
To have built in aid of support.
Like, you know, this is something like, it's just the defaults that matter, right?
Because, because authors are, authors are lazy.
Developers are lazy.
People are lazy.
We want to do what is there by default.
If you, if you, if you have the outcome, if whatever the outcome is, if it's the default, it's more likely to be the case.
If you have to, if you have to do something else, if you have to go that extra step to do something, then most people aren't going to bother because they have the time to do the default, if that.
And so, let, you know, let's, taking that effort as, as creators of tools to go off and to, to, to implement that as a default is really important.
And that's something that we've done in, in Drupal for accessibility and something that, that, that has worked quite well for our community.
So we definitely encourage that for both sustainability and accessibility.
So how many people here are familiar with WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?
Has anyone read it from end to end?
Okay, we've got two people, three people.
It's like it's, it's the most boring document.
It's, it's written by committee, oh my gosh, is it ever a dreadful document?
Because it was written by committee.
How many people here have read the Web Sustainability Guidelines?
Less, because it's a, it's a much newer document.
This is something that only was released in September at the, the WC3 forum.
But, but yeah, the, the, the, the Web Sustainability Guidelines have been written for, for, for it to be human consumable.
And it's, it's written for the, the WCAG structure and framework, because we ultimately want to create a standard that governments and other organizations can sign on to and say,
our organization is going to embrace these best practices for sustainability.
And we want to go off and to, to measure ourselves against these criteria so that we can, we can put that stamp of approval that says we are meeting these best practices.
So, from an accessibility point of view, the, the principles are, is it perceivable, operable, understandable and robust?
And, okay, those are fairly generic concepts, but they've been broken down and explained enough times that many people understand how that's, how that's structured.
Is it written in the most usable or most easy, easy language?
We'll know, but, but it's, it's a, it's a fairly useful set of structures.
The Web Sustainability Guidelines are based on, on the Sustainable Web Manifesto and the principles there are to be clean, to be efficient, to be open, to be honest, to be regenerative and be resilient.
So, again, those are broad, broad goals that are, I think, help the, help us try and understand where, where those are of the North Stars in terms of where, where digital products should be going.
I did, because this is an open source event, want to go off and highlight that, that open right now in the Web Manifesto is, is structured as products and services that provide, that are willing to be accessible, sites to allow for open exchange of information
and allow users to control their data. So, that's not quite the same definition used by the OSI or the GNU Foundations or others, but it's a, it's a starting point and hopefully as more people jump on board and if our community is able to embrace this,
I'm hoping that, that the manifesto may be able to be modified so that there's actually stronger language about supporting open source because we need to be able to collaborate with each other.
We need to learn from each other's best practices and we need to use the innovative abilities of open source to be able to make change, the changes that we need faster.
We don't have the time to go off and, for all of us to go off and, and to make the same mistakes over and over again.
We need to be able to quickly find out what works, share that, those, those ideas and experiences about what works around sustainability with others in our community and with other communities, right?
We need to learn and test our ideas. We need to be evidence driven, not something that is based on, well my community thinks this and your community thinks that.
It's like, no, let's get out and, and find evidence to be able to determine what is the best approach.
I would love to be able to have the numbers that Wagtail has for Drupal to be able to say, we think this is the CO2 impact for, for Drupal.
It would be much bigger than Wagtail. Likewise with WordPress, it would be much bigger than Drupals.
But to have those numbers would be useful to go off and say, this is actually what our community is responsible for and why removing this megabyte or this, this, this byte of data is important because it's this byte of data is being used on, you know, we know this,
but with this byte of data is being loaded and transferred across websites, you know, a billion times a day.
Like that's huge when you're trying to, when you're thinking about the load times, like it's a millisecond. What does it matter? On your side, it matters nothing.
But when you're scaling it up to a global level and it's being replicated, you know, a million times like it is in the Drupal condition, that millisecond matters because that's, I'm not going to do the math, but it's, you know, still quite a few seconds.
Any questions about, about both web sustainability guidelines or the web accessibility guidelines? No, any other CMSs, any sort of opportunity to jump in, contradict me, tell me what I've missed so far?
How far are they from being official standard?
So how far is the, the, the web standards, web sustainability guidelines from becoming an official WC3 standard? And thank you.
So there's right now a community group that set up and created the draft to people, basically, Alexander and Tim went off and did most of the work to try and create this draft.
And it's, it's really quite good and quite readable. But that's not how any other WC3 specifications being done.
So, so right now it's a good enough document for people to start punching at.
But we need to both set up a sustainability guidelines working group. We're in the process of doing that.
So creating a charter to go and, and to create that, the oversight, invite more people into that, that working group.
Once the working group has a charter, and then there's the long process of going off and, and getting an adoption for that.
And then as soon as we have two use cases, so if the, the UK government and the US government say, yes, we're going to endorse this, this is the direction we see going ahead,
or it doesn't have to be the US, could be, you know, there's the French government and the UK government decide that this is a useful,
and then, then there's a, there's two implementations of this guideline and then basically the WC3 can make that a recommendation.
But that's, that's the path forward for this and it is like so many community organizing efforts, a bit of a sausage making factory.
So it's, it's great to have people involved and would love to have people check to be, to be involved in the web sustainability guidelines
and to help sort of champion the formation of this because it is really important to have, have documents that are understandable
and that are executable, that we have passed ahead to go off and implement those.
So wanted to highlight some other, some other innovations from the web sustainability guidelines.
One is, there's a real effort to try and be usable. So there, there, there's the WC3 document and many people who've, who've looked at other WC3 documents,
whether it's on HTML or CSS or whatnot, you see that structure and your eyes start to go, go, get weary and you close them and whatnot.
Well, the, the, the committee's gone and built a JSON file for the WC3 standard.
So it's available both in the JSON format and the WC3 standard format and also in the web sustainability, web, sorry, web sustainability.
Web, I'm blanking on the name of the, of the, the website, the web sustainability guidelines.org. Is that right? No, that's not quite right.
I guess web sustainability.org. I should have it here in my notes and I do not.
But there, it's available in, in, in three different formats. I wonder which is designed to be more human readable and, and, and a shareable reference.
We've also structured around different elements. So there's, there's, there's structured around, around user experience design, on web development, on hosting and infrastructure, as well as on, on business strategy and product hosting.
So thinking this, think about this as holistically as possible. There are some elements of the web sustainability guidelines that do touch on, on, on issues of accessibility because if people are, are not able to go off and access your services and they're trying to net, net,
to navigate around to go off and access the, your, your content, that's something that, that is, is going to be a performance issue. It's going to be something where it's going to cost CPU cycles because you're, you're constantly trying to go up and access this.
Also, it's, it's, you know, I think a lot of people have, have looked at the, the, the data centers and, and the hosting environment is one piece of it.
But actually if you look at the, the overall energy component, the hosting piece is just, it's actually a small part of the puzzle.
You know, most hosting companies are very aware of the, the cost of electricity and are doing their, their effort to, to minimize that cost so that they can increase their revenues.
The real, from an electricity and, and, and CO2 perspective, there's a lot more work coming from, from, from our own devices, right?
Like we plug in our devices, we maintain our devices. There's also elements of, of embedded energy.
So, you know, I don't know how much CO2 is involved to go off and create this iPhone. It's not an iPhone, this, this Samsung phone.
But, but there's, but looking at that embedded energy and the energy that it's going to take throughout the whole life cycle, life, life cycle of the product is something that we need to be starting to think about.
So I mentioned that JSON file is, is a part of the innovation. They've, they've also, the WCAG format doesn't really structure the, the, the, the impact of the level of effort.
But it's nice to see that, that the web sustainability guidelines have tried to go off and to, to pull those apart.
So you can get a sense of what is the, what is the easiest thing for me to do that will have the, the biggest bang for the buck, right?
If you can, you can highlight and structure your information around that ROI, then that's something that you can more easily scale up and, and know how to go off and invest your efforts.
Because we need to be able to, to get people starting on this. There's a lot of, if you give people a checklist of 100,000 things that they need to change to the website, like, yeah, good luck.
Maybe they'll hit the right ones. Maybe they'll just ignore it and walk away, right?
But if you can say, here's the top issue right now that you can address. This is how you can start now having to have a bigger impact in your, in your, in your work.
Then, then that can motivate people to get started and to say that they can actually make a difference.
Because nobody wants to, to take on a wall of errors and, and to take, add that to their existing issue queue.
Yeah. So, so I'm a big fan of automated tests. How many, how many other people here like automated tests?
Get the machines to do it. You know, and, you know, there's good reason for that.
I mean, people are good at some things, but we're generally not good at doing the same thing over and over and over again.
Sisyphus really should have been a bot, because he would have, he wouldn't have minded at all.
But in terms of automatic tools, I do want to go off and point out both Google Lighthouse and Unlighthouse.
Has anyone tried Unlighthouse before?
So, Unlighthouse.dev. It basically scans your whole website, more or less, with Google Lighthouse and gives you a Lighthouse score.
So, it's what's from a, from a sustainability point of view.
That comes with all of the stuff that comes with Lighthouse. You get the performance hits.
You also get the accessibility score for that. The accessibility score is less than acts.
You're not getting as much of the features as you do with acts, but it is a good solid starting point for people.
But if you look at the performance numbers, that's a great place to start looking for sustainability.
There's lots of overlap between sustainability and performance.
And it's so useful to find allies too, like who are the people who are interested in the same issue.
And absolutely performance people are on the same camp of sustainability.
They're sort of like security and privacy. They're not the same, but they're very, very related.
Also useful to point out sitespeed.io and co2.js. You can also tie in actscore into this as well.
How people know what sitespeed.io is. It's similar to what Google Lighthouse can do.
It does gain a site, or Unlighthouse can do. It does a site-wide crawl.
It provides recommendations and a little coach that gives you some direction.
It is open source, which is good. Not that Google Lighthouse isn't open source as well, but you deal with Google.
But the co2.js module is a tool that's being implemented by the Web Sustainability, sorry, the Green Software Foundation.
Green Web Foundation, thank you very much Chris.
So the Green Web Foundation, fortunately, is the organization that's behind the co2.js.
And it's a great module, particularly to give a snapshot quickly of what is available within your website
and what the estimated co2 impact is for that.
There's a lot more work that needs to be done.
Two tools like co2.js. The default right now is to look at a byte model that is more or less looking at how many bits are transferred and to focus on that side.
There's so much more research that is needed to actually get to something that is a verifiable amount of co2.
So we know that one byte of an image is going to have a lot less co2 impact than one meg of JavaScript.
JavaScript is so much more intensive in terms of CPU processing, whereas rendering HTML and images are really not a big deal for browsers.
But JavaScript is something that does take a lot of processing power.
But it's a really great tool and you can integrate it with sitespeed.io and have that information available.
I also want to point out EcoGrader and websitecarbon.com.
Both of those are good tools to get a sense of how heavy your website is.
Take all this information with a grain of salt.
This doesn't actually give you a number that gives you an estimate.
That is something you can work towards and improve on.
But just like with accessibility tools like the WaveTool bar or Microsoft's open source accessibility insights,
just because you don't have any errors within your accessibility tool doesn't mean that your website is accessible.
It means that there are no automated errors that have been found with your tools.
So it's trying to understand what the automated tools can give you.
They can't tell you that there are no accessibility errors.
They can only tell you that there's no errors that the automated tools can identify.
And the same thing is going to be the case with sustainability.
We're going to have to have human input in the mix.
So manual, we're going to have to have humans who are looking at do we have this page?
Do we need to have this page?
Is this something we can yank off of?
Is there an easier process to get where people need to go in order to achieve the goals of what we're trying to achieve?
That's a very human thing to try and understand how humans are acting.
We can't be expecting bots to do that.
Same with on accessibility.
It's a question of does this alt text actually make sense?
It may or may not, but we need to be able to...
A bot isn't going to be able to tell that.
It can tell you whether or not there are...
If it's image123.jpg, that we can get a machine to do.
Most don't, but it's possible to go off and do that.
But we need to be thinking about where the limitations of what the machines can do
and what we're thinking about these processes.
And again with JavaScript, is this JavaScript file actually needed?
Could somebody actually navigate this information with the mouse?
What are the comparisons between the accessibility world and the sustainability world?
What can we learn from one that we need to bring to the other
as we scale up and start addressing issues of sustainability in our sites?
Is it content fulfilling user needs?
Does it work for the assistive technology?
Those are all kinds of related questions between the two different disciplines.
Any questions at this point?
Going through a lot of stuff and I know how hot this room is
and how overwhelming FOSDEM is.
So totally understand that if people just want to go off and engage.
But do feel free to go off and stop me if you have questions.
So I wanted to touch a bit more about open source tools for sustainability
because this is an open source event.
So we've got, and Chris, if you see things that are missing,
please go off and jump and say if there's things that are missing.
There's the carbon cloud footprint, Scandis, how do you spell that? Scrapis here?
Yeah, whatever, that one.
There's another one by Yadz.
It's such a hard time naming things. Why is it so difficult?
Cube Green, Kepler, Green Metrics Tool, CO2.js.
And CO2.js is built into Firefox.
I learned about that last year at FOSDEM and it's really wonderful
that that's been something that's being brought into a popular browser.
Hopefully Chrome will be shamed into doing that as well
because we do need to go off and build these tools in.
I also mentioned sitesv.io previously.
In terms of websites to learn more, there's the awesome green software list.
So you can go and find all kinds of information about green software
that's an open source tool that are available for that.
Also opensustain.tech and climatetriage.com.
So there's so much information out there.
A lot of it is free.
This is stuff that people are learning and sharing because they need to go off
and because there's not a lot of awareness.
This is not an issue that most people still believe that as long as you don't print out the web,
if you don't print out your pages, you're being environmentally friendly.
We're not thinking about the overall impact of our digital devices
and the actual weight that they carry on the planet.
Any questions about that? Any tools are missing?
Chris, anything big that I might have missed?
No, the only thing to ask is that there's a talk tomorrow where it's Firefox profiled talking about sustainability.
Excellent.
And there is also a talk by a digital spread on Skafanja at 6 o'clock tonight as well.
So tonight at 6 o'clock there's a talk on Skafanja which is...
I'm going to be at lower this now.
Yeah, that's taking in the other room at 6 p.m.
Marvel. That's great.
Definitely want to learn more about that.
That's the energy room, is that right?
Yes.
And also there's...
Sorry, tomorrow there's the talk about the Firefox profiler that's in the energy room as well.
No, I think that's another room.
But if you look up where sustainability, Firefox, it will show up.
Wonderful. Thank you.
I will definitely share that out after the talk as well.
So that's great.
Sorry, in terms of the question, sorry, did I repeat enough of it that it's understandable?
Okay, excellent.
So yeah, we need to go off and just like accessibility, we need to bring these things in early as possible.
So how do we tie this into our development process?
How do we start looking as early on in the process so that we're catching where we're starting to add bloat?
Where does the page start to slow down?
How do we make sure that every sprint were a little bit faster and a little lighter than we were previously?
So we want to catch bugs before they ever get to production.
So it has to be part of the CI CD process.
If it gets to production, it's too late.
Not that you can't fix it later, we probably won't.
We're developers.
So also trying to go off and setting page budgets is quite useful as well.
With accessibility, I like to go off and aim for zero X errors.
So they call that axe clean in the DQ world.
For website pages, like you're going to need to set your own, it'd be lovely if people could go off and reach 200 grams of CO2 per page.
Most are much, much more than that.
So I don't know how that many sites out there that are meeting that 200 grams of page, but let's set a goal and try and see if we can improve it over time.
And measure our pages now so we know what we are now and see if we can get achievable goals over time.
Again, think about sustainability and accessibility bugs.
We need to start, we can't think about these as features.
If we leave them as features, they're not going to be addressed.
They have to be seen as bugs and treated like bugs, right?
So that they're more likely to be fixed in their address early in the process.
And even if you're looking at minor bugs, if you're repeating the same minor bug a million times, it becomes a major issue.
So again, think about the cycle and how these things scale up in our tools.
Look at these tools and try to find ways to get a multi-layered process for quality.
How do we make sure that we're building into our CI CD, that we're measuring support for authors, that we're scanning the environment for errors,
that we're doing randomized tests, like we don't want to be scanning every page every week.
But we should have some sort of process where we have a plan for how we're going to provide automated and manual scans for the information.
Are there ways that we can construct your manual testing?
How do we try to make sure we have a thorough rock process to remove content that we don't need?
Are we doing annual reviews and doing deeper guides?
Are we encouraging people to get certifications or to learn more about this?
There are some good tools out there from the Linux Foundation and others around learning about the sustainability impacts of digital tools.
We've got some ideas about what a robust approach to accessibility looks like.
Very similar. We've got to go off and check for errors in our process.
Use tools like Editorially and Sally to go off and evaluate it.
Is anyone going to use Purple Hats as an accessibility tool?
Purple Hats is a great tool for crawling for accessibility errors.
Singapore's Government Digital Services has created this using Act,
but it's useful to try and think about ways to build processes and to have a belt and suspender approach, just like you do with security.
There's also a tool called the WKGEM, which is WKG Evaluation Methodology,
which is useful for thinking about a structured approach for evaluating websites or an accessibility
to see that you can compare two websites and you're going to have some confidence that you're going to get similar results
or similar kinds of comparisons so that you're not dealing with an apples and oranges situation.
I also want to go off and highlight that in terms of, yeah, we've got information around CO2.js
and incorporating that into our pages. There's tools like SiteSpeed.io, the Firefox Profiler.
There's also efforts to try and have, I don't know what the evaluation,
what the comparison would be between WKGEM, this accessibility evaluation, and something like sustainability.
I don't know how you would create that tool. The Web Sustainability Guidelines is trying to do that, to have that comparison,
so you have some way to do a comparison of two websites and have a sense of how sustainable both of them are,
but this is stuff that needs to be developed. There's no tools for that.
The Firefox Profiler is one tool. We need to have others because Firefox isn't the only browser out there.
It may be the best browser out there, but it's not the only one out there, so we need to be thinking about this
in terms of how people are engaging with the tools.
I do want to encourage people to go and to learn more about sustainability, to think about what their next steps are.
Here's the sustainablewebdesign.org website. That's the URL I forgot about earlier.
This is the Human-Readable approach.
Is everyone here use Slack? More or less, even if you have to, just because you have to.
The climateaction.tech has a really great community for learning more about this,
and I think it's a wonderful place for people to ask questions and to be able to share their ideas
and to, if you've written blog posts about how you're engaging with sustainability in your open source project
and you want to share that with others, that's a great place to do that.
I think that's where I learned about the work that Wagtail is doing and tried to sort of bring that over.
There's also a whole bunch of interesting books, and there's more and more coming out all the time.
There's Green Code, there's SustainableWebDesign, there's Building Green Software.
Depending whether you're a designer or a developer, whether you're back-end, front-end,
there's material out there which is geared to you.
Take a look at what's available and see if there's material out there that you can read and learn from.
There's also any project managers here in the group?
Okay, two project managers, excellent.
Three, so there's now actually a course that I don't have listed here on sustainability for project managers
to learn how to go off and how to project manager, what do they need to know in order to learn about digital sustainability.
There's also some excellent podcasts including Environment Variables where you can hear
our very own Mr. Chris Adams, much of the time, not all the time, but quite a lot of the time.
And Green I.O., which is another great podcast, there's others as well where people are being done.
There's a lot of places to learn about what's available here and engage with it.
But I really want to encourage people here to test their code, to test their websites using tools like
the website carbon.com website or eco grader or co2.js, test your stuff and see how it looks,
what you can learn from it and share that with others.
Let's start talking about that so that we're encouraging other people to think about what their impact is with the digital tools that they use.
And with that, I can be contacted here and I can also, if people have any questions,
happy to answer questions or engage with people here as people for CFET.
Thank you, Mike.
Any questions?
I'm glad I didn't answer all of everyone's thoughts.
Hi, thank you. Thank you for this.
I'm not familiar with these topics, especially sustainability.
You're talking about accessibility and sustainability as they are somehow related to each other.
They're both elements of quality.
The way I see it, accessibility is more about individuals, users, on the land, sustainability is about the general audience,
the general environment issues.
So how do they correlate to each other?
I mean, if your website is sustainable in terms of electricity and money saving,
it doesn't mean that it's accessible for a user which has issues using your website.
They're mostly combined in my head because I work in both areas.
So to some extent, you can have different areas, but there's also a real effort to see the development of,
like you know about human-centered design?
There's the effort to create planet-friendly design.
We are the only species that is engaging with the web at this point that we know of.
And so we are the users in this case.
And we only live here and a few people in the space station.
But it's like having a planet-friendly focus is...
Of course they're...
But the way I see it, companies will be happy to talk about sustainability because they will save money.
Right.
I'm not sure a company will be happy to talk about accessibility because it's not giving directly money to them.
Is it correct what I'm saying or just maybe my wrong perception of everything?
There's definitely different incentives.
And partly it comes down to there's new legislation that is coming into place and finds that will be in place.
And certainly in the U.S. if you're trying to sell to a university or a government agency,
there's an effort to go off and to meet Section 508, which is now the more or less WKG 2.0 standards.
So there are some financial incentives around that.
But there's also... And people look at sustainability.
They think about the cost of both producing or buying new hardware,
but also in terms of electricity savings and seeing that as being a cost savings initiative.
But there's other elements about digital sustainability that does actually cost money too.
Like to do it properly, you do need time to focus the developers on building systems that are optimizing them
and finding ways to cut down on the amount of craft that's...
How many websites have redundant JavaScript libraries running?
Or they've got multiple instances of analytics on their site or other tools that the marketing team wanted to install,
but nobody's looked at for months.
We know this happens in our industry all the time.
And we are paying a price for that, but not necessarily a price that is...
That the companies themselves are paying.
Again, from an accessibility point of view, a lot of people are seeing this a lot cheaper
to go off and to add an overlay to their website and hope that paying $50 a month will go off
and wish away all of their accessibility problems,
and they'll have something that they can justifiably say,
we've got that covered for $50 a month as opposed to the justifiably thousands,
hundreds of thousands of dollars to go off and pay people to actually fix the problems.
But that just pushes it to the fringe.
It's not something that actually solves the problem.
Chris.
Hi there. You can hear me all right, can you?
Was that?
You can hear me okay.
Cool.
I'm curious if there is a role you think that public sector organizations
or early organizations could play like we saw with accessibility.
Right.
So mainstream this or make it easier for people to adopt like we saw with say public sector
and Microsoft and stuff like that.
Are there any similarities there that you would draw people's attention to?
Absolutely.
I mean, ultimately we've got to look at incentives, right?
Follow the money.
And that's starting to happen with accessibility, with sustainability.
People are still not aware of it.
And the UK government has done some great work talking about sustainability
and digit and measuring it and trying to be aware of it.
And their site is probably the most sustainable in the world.
So it's really wonderful to see that.
But also the, yeah, I think that the government sector is in most countries
the single biggest procure of technology.
So if we can get government to commit to buying green software,
it will make a huge deal in our industry.
Because people, if they want the contracts,
they're going to have to go off and be able to follow the web sustainability guidelines
and say that this complies, right?
Even if they're doing a half-hearted effort,
it will make a huge difference if government steps up and says this matters.
Even just to make it an issue of public discussion.
Thank you.
Any question?
Thank you, Mike.
You mentioned earlier the AI hype.
Do you think we can find that for either the BDT or accessibility?
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
I mean, it can do wonderful things.
But people also, there's an environmental cost to AI,
and that's something that is not being measured.
And so yeah, we can go off and solve some problems with AI,
but we have to be very careful about how we're doing that
and whether or not we're being responsible for our use of AI.
Because it's something that we can't just solve problems
and throw AI at a problem and hope that this goes away.
We need to have humans involved in the process to see this actually makes things better
and be focusing, like with accessibility,
we need to make the people with lived experience of disabilities the experts.
They're ultimately the ones who need to be heard to know that they're able to access these sites.
And not the standards, not the experts,
but the people with lived experience with disability need to be involved.
And the same goes with sustainability.
You can't just have, like, we have to be measuring what the overall life cycle impact is.
That includes people coming to conferences like this.
It also includes the cost of involving thousands of generative AI models
to go off and to evaluate the performance of websites.
We need to be cautious about it because I think that it can be useful,
but it has a huge cost.
Thank you, Mike. No other question?
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
It was green the whole time. Perfect.
Thank you.