In the latest installment of Writers in Tech, our host Yuval Keshtcher, founder of the UX Writing Hub, is joined by Jaime Walke, a principal UX writer and content designer at Booking.com. The duo delve into the realms of UX writing, accessibility, and the evolution of Booking.com's UX writing team. Jaime talks about his transition from tourism to tech companies, the ethos of continuous learning at Booking.com, and the growth of UX writing in the organization. They also explore the subject of accessibility, discussing its ethical implications, business benefits, and its broad spectrum that includes users with disabilities as well as those using assistive technologies.
Guest Jaime Walke, a principal UX writer and content designer at Booking.com, sheds light on his journey in the tech world, his role at Booking.com, and the company's pioneering work in UX writing. (01:22)
Jaime shares insights into the growth of the UX writing team at Booking.com, from a small team of 7-8 members to a flourishing team of nearly 80. (01:58)
The duo discuss a project at Booking.com called A11y, which is dedicated to making products accessible for everyone and complying with legal standards. (03:24)
Jaime Walke emphasizes the ethical considerations around accessibility, and its potential business benefits, given the increased buying power of people with accessibility needs. (19:14)
Jaime Walke talks about his role in creating an inclusive screen reader experience for users, and why UX writing plays a crucial role in promoting accessibility. (23:39)
Free UX Writing Course: https://course.uxwritinghub.com/free_course
Free AI for UX Course : https://course.uxwritinghub.com/free-course-ai-for-ux
Check out the UX Writing Academy: https://uxwritinghub.com/join-the-ux-writing-academy/
Follow Jaime: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaime-n-69746419/
Booking.com's UX Writing Medium blog: https://medium.com/booking-writes
00:00
Accessibility. A lot of people would frame it around making products work for users who have a disability. But I think the better way of framing accessibility is making products work for users who are experiencing some kind of barrier. This is Writers Intact, a podcast where today's top content strategists, UX writers and content designers share their well kept industry secrets.
00:34
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Writers in Tech, a podcast brought to you by the UX Writing Hub. My name is Yuval Keshter, and I am the founder of the UX Writing Hub, which is a platform that educates people about UX Writing content design, everything in between, helping people to get into the field or upscale themselves in this field into leadership roles or advanced content such as figma, training, generative, AI, you name it. Today I have an amazing guest that have huge experience with UX Writing way before people actually called it UX Writing, to be honest. He started doing it a lot of years ago in different companies such as Booking, then Kayaks, then Uber, going back to Booking again, specializing in accessibility and localization as a principal UX Writing and Content Design at Booking. And his name is Jamie Walk, and I'm very happy to have you today.
01:38
Jamie, how are you?
01:40
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm great. Just enjoying a nice overcast gray Monday in Amsterdam, right? Yes.
01:48
That's awesome. Do you like living in Amsterdam?
01:51
Yeah, very much so. We just had Kings Day last week. It's a national celebration every April where we get in the street and have a party. And it was a sunny day that day, so that was good.
02:03
Awesome. I know that you worked as a running educational tours, like, in another decade, in another phase of your career.
02:11
Wow. Yeah, that was a long time ago. Yeah, just after university, I was running tours for high school kids coming over from America and going around Europe and trying to keep things educational rather than anything else. But yeah, that was also fun.
02:31
And you had something over there with different languages, right? Spanish, French and English. Correct? Yeah.
02:37
So my university degree was in Spanish and French, and it's kind of my only hobby is languages, so I kind of dip in and out of several other ones every now and again. I'm currently trying Greek, so tricky.
02:55
That sounds tricky. I just came back from Greek one week ago. It was fun, but I stick to English when I'm there.
03:04
That's a great country, great people. They just like it a bit extra fear if you know some words, probably.
03:11
I want to ask you a question about okay, so in your career, it's interesting how you worked, like, in tourism, then went to work in different touristic related companies such as Booking, but technological companies, and you worked in different companies, and then you came back to Booking. So how was that? Tell me a little bit about your background and your history in this field?
03:34
Yeah, because of my degree, I studied languages. I'm very curious about cultures and travel. So I wanted to work in travel and never really knew about UX writing. I mean, it definitely didn't exist at that point. But yeah, my entry into UX writing through Booking.com was purely because I was looking for a job I could do at a travel company and started as a content editor at Booking. And gradually, at some point, I ended up working on a couple of projects with what were we called at that point? I think it was Ecommerce copywriters. And they were the original UX writing team at Booking and worked on a couple of projects with them and got really interested in how they worked, essentially seeing the way that they could really measure their impact and see what their words were doing in reality, how customers were relating to what they were writing.
04:43
The writing I'd done previously, it was, you produce it, you put it out there, but you can't really improve on it, really. And that was something that I love. Something I still love about Booking is the kind of learning culture. It's not really that you make many assumptions and stick with them. You might make deduction and try it out and test it. A B, test it, run user research, and eventually you can kind of learn a lot about how to communicate with users in the best way in certain situations. And so I never really left Booking for anything bad. I was curious to see what other companies did, how they approached UX writing. So. Yeah, I worked at Kayak in the US. I worked for Uber, and it's really interesting to be able to move through different types of products. Like, Uber is this highly brand oriented product.
05:43
It's a movement. People talk about Uber so much more readily than they would talk about Booking, for example. It's an everyday thing in their lives. So, yeah, it's cool to move through different companies and see how they approach UX writing. But yeah, at the end of the day, Booking.com, it's a great place to be, great people. There's about 80 UX writers there, so it's a great community of people to talk to, and they're all coming from different types of backgrounds, different types of companies, and bringing it all together is great to see.
06:17
What a journey first of all, about Uber definitely agreed that this is some kind of a movement that you saw a report that was published by Uber about what people are losing inside of Uber cars. And it's like a report during every year about what people are losing in Uber in every country by every day. So it's like, in Sunday most people lose their passports, but in Thursday most people lose their wallet and stuff like that. When companies get creative and do, like, funny reports like that. Or interesting reports such as Spotify. Also Earring Review and none of those what you had to say about booking. So that's interesting because I heard from many people that booking first of all, I really like booking in a way that I feel like they kind of pioneers when it comes to UX writing, kind of defined what is UX writing?
07:08
Before it was a thing. There is someone that every time you step at bookings headquarters in Amsterdam, they talk about her, kelly, I believe, is.
07:15
Her name, that she was like, Kelly, she's our director. Kelly Chambers.
07:20
Yeah. And that she like, she was there and there was like this core team of people that you were also part of them, I assume, in a way, kind of paving the way for many others in many different companies.
07:31
Yeah, I mean, like I say, at the very beginning, were ecommerce Copywriters, and we started having to as is a very booking approach to it. We started a B, testing different, what do you call them, job titles in job vacancies to see how we could get better candidates based on what people were being attracted to title wise. So even moving towards the title of UX Writer, were probably part of that journey. I started out, I think I was the 7th or the 8th UX Writer in that team. And through, like I say, the kind of focus on AB experimentation and really being able to show the impact of copy. Yeah, we've grown to almost 80 now. It's great.
08:23
That's amazing. And one of your fields of expertise is accessibility. So for the people that are not familiar with accessibility, what did even say? Most of our audience supposed to know by now. But let's go back to basic what is accessibility from the UX writing point of view?
08:42
Yeah, so accessibility, it's an interesting field, accessibility. A lot of people would frame it around making products work for users who have a disability. But I think the better way of framing accessibility is making products work for users who are experiencing some kind of barrier because it's not always disabled users who are going to benefit from accessible methodologies or optimization. So in a very basic way, it works to cater to users who are using assistive technologies. So if somebody is blind, then they would use a type of software called a screen reader that would they would kind of tab through elements on the screen, one by one, and the screen reader would read out to them what is happening on the screen and what is in front of them. There are a lot of different types of assistive technologies as well. It's not all about helping blind users.
09:48
It's also maybe people who have reduced mobility and they also need to tab one by one through elements on the screen. But you can also, particularly with UX writing in mind, you move into the realm of cognitive accessibility and just how you are going to make good decisions about how you're going to represent information in a way that makes it understandable to the widest audience possible. So you're catering to people who maybe have a permanent condition, like Dyslexia or Dyscalculia, which is like Dyslexia with numbers. But you can also think about it in terms of not semi permanent situational barriers. Like, if you're really stressed, you might find it difficult to take information. As an example from Uber. Uber drivers are driving along, needing to concentrate on the road, but also trying to pay attention to an app. So it's about the display of information in that way as well that isn't purely linked just to disability.
10:57
It's any kind of barrier that way.
11:00
I have an interesting story about Booking.com specifically. So were just talking about my trip to Greece the other day. It was like one week and a half ago and I booked it completely spontaneously. It was like, I found a really cheap flight with my wife. It was some kind of a micro honeymoon or something like that. So we found a really cheap flight in like 2 hours and were like, in the airport already. I used Jupiter to plan the trip. It was in Cretin, an island in Greece, and I by accident booked the hotel in the wrong neighborhood, like, in the wrong part of the island.
11:40
Oh, nice.
11:42
Yes, exactly. Because I blame the ADHD for that, to be honest. Maybe the DHD, but it's like sometimes I'm just all over the place. Too many tabs open, just booked it in the wrong place by accident. So, just a fun story about how it's really important. And it wasn't Booking's fault, by the way. It was my fault. My fault. Booking was great. It was great experience. It was really good. It was really good. But for me, it was just a silly mistake on my hand and Booking was really helpful, also helping me to solve that mistake as well. So good. Is booking glad? Okay, so we did talk about what is accessibility, and I know that there is this project that I keep seeing, a eleven y. Correct?
12:37
Yeah, that's the short form for accessibility. So A eleven y is like how you have L ten N for localization. It's just because we've got not enough time to type the entire word out. So it's just an industry term for accessibility, a eleven y.
12:56
That's good. To make this term accessible to people like me that wasn't sure, and tell me, okay, so are we doing it only because we're doing it for Better World or we're doing it because it's a good business decision? Like, why are we doing this accessibility thing?
13:19
Yeah, good question. Because it does kind of fall very neatly between the two. Obviously, companies, a lot of companies have a mission. Booking dot com's mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. And so the accessibility team at Booking really attaches meaning to that. We're making it easier for everyone to experience the world, and we need to really embrace that everyone in our mission, and ethically, we should be making products that are accessible to everybody. And then there is also the element of it where it comes down to kind of hard facts around laws and legal issues of compliance. For example. So in 2025 there is a European directive that's going to be put in place. That means that every product built within Europe needs to comply with a certain standard of accessibility that's based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
14:25
It's called WCAG because that's a really fun acronym to attempt. And so, yeah, there's that aspect of it. There's an estimated, I think, billion people worldwide live daily with some kind of accessibility need. But then, like I say, it's not purely people with permanent disabilities who are benefiting from accessibility. It's a better way of honing your product so that it can be used in tricky situations. And I think even those billion people, I think the estimate is that they have about $8 trillion of buying power. There's lots of moving parts. It's ethical, it's business, it's mission based, it's just a big area and it's important to get right.
15:19
All right, so it just reminded me two stories that I'm familiar with. One that Domino's Pizza website or App wasn't accessible, which made them lose millions of dollars because someone sued them.
15:34
A whole legal case. Yeah, I remember that.
15:38
The Beyonce website as well. So that's another story that I'm from Beyonce. Beyonce was sued over accessibility issues. Who would believe Quinn be?
15:48
Yeah, it happens.
15:50
So it's somewhere between being great to the wall, but also being ethical, because at some point it's not going to be legal to do something that is not accessible. And also a smart business decision.
16:05
I think, as well. It's recognizing, I say, that accessibility can benefit more people than purely people who are living day to day with a disability, let's say. But it's also recognizing that these people are really out there and they can use these products that we're building. I have a colleague who is blind and he shows us how you can navigate with a screen reader and get your job done. And it's just about recognizing that it's there. I think a lot of people value working at companies that think through that human level far enough. It's also that aspect as well.
16:50
So how do you do it@booking.com? Anything related to accessibility?
16:55
Yeah, well, so accessibility at booking, to go back to what were talking about at the very beginning, I left booking for a space of about five and a bit years. So I came back last year at the beginning of February and I came straight into the accessibility team because UX wise, it's an important thing to think through and get right. So they wanted to put a lot more power into the team. And so the team had existed for a while already. It had gone through a couple of different phases. I think originally years and years ago, accessibility was approached as a kind of bug fixing exercise, where people would run audits of the website, they would find accessibility bugs, let's say. So for example, if a screen reader is trying to read an element of the screen that is visual, it's a kind of icon, let's say, and it carries meaning, but there hasn't been copy written that would replace that meaning.
18:08
So that would be flagged as a bug. And so the approach was let's get all of these bugs and let's get rid of all of these bugs. And it just wasn't sustainable. I think there's hundreds of product teams at Booking working every day on trying to run experiments and optimize and build new features and trying to bug bash any kind of accessibility related to that. It's not sustainable. So the approach of Bookings taking is that we have a central accessibility team, we have kind of cross functional team in that way. So I'm in there representing UX writing, we have design research, we have all kinds, we have Android, iOS, web engineering represented. And it's not just that we are there to fix bugs, it's so that we represent all of these crafts, as we call them, and that we are able to educate our craft communities around accessibility and try to amplify the knowledge through education.
19:15
Because we're strong believers that accessibility shouldn't be an afterthought, it should be built into how you are approaching your work. It's not that you would design an experience and then think what is the accessibility side of this? It's just that when you're going through any phase of the kind of product development design process, you have accessibility in there, it's something that you're thinking about just as much as you're thinking about. But does this flex to mobile as well as web? Or does this work in dark mode as well as light mode, like those kinds of considerations, accessibility should be just as natural as any of them. See, that's our approach. We are spreading the word within Booking. We're getting people on board, we're focusing on trying to give them tools, getting closer to how they work in their day to day. Because we all realize that with accessibility, it can be a big topic that feels a bit scary and it feels like a lot to try to integrate it into your working processes.
20:31
So that's why we have the accessibility team as well, because we focus on trying to take this big topic and make it relevant. We work out where it can fit in to our work processes. That's where I'm focusing particularly with UX writing, is working out how to build it into our writing processes.
20:55
Interesting. It really reminds me also the process of UX writing. So many companies in a really good world, they would have a UX writer, but most of the time it's enough to forth. And it's like what you said about bug bash, it's like, okay, so let's fix the copy here and let's fix the copy there. But wait, if you brought the UX writer earlier on board or the accessibility person earlier on board, so we wouldn't be facing these huge issues right now.
21:25
Yeah, you see it in places where accessibility sometimes just falls purely on engineering to think about, and that's not fair on engineering at all. They shouldn't have to have that pure responsibility. And there's also better people around to kind of address the issues. Like I was saying, with certain experiences, especially on mobile, where you have maybe an icon that's being used as a CTA, I think if you go to booking.com, you can see in the top bar, there's a button there that is a speech bubble. And I think at some point, someone trying to be helpful as an engineer, just trying to put some kind of copy to it. They said speech bubble, that's what it is. But if you get the UX writer involved at the correct time, then they know that, yeah, it's the picture of a speech bubble. But the meaning behind that speech bubble is not that it's contact the property where you're going to be staying.
22:32
It's contact customer sport, maybe. But yeah, it's just important that it's part of your workflow so that those things are thought through at the right time.
22:42
Let's talk more about specific examples for accessibility for UX writers and where it's connected.
22:50
Yeah, I think the kind of headline use case in general for UX writing is talking about screen readers. Because like I mentioned, screen readers are used by blind people in order to hear what is happening on the screen. I think that makes it for UX writers, a very interesting process because we're at the steering wheel. There a lot of the time when we're working together with a designer, there's a kind of unifying moment between the information, the content on the screen, and all of the kind of visual cues and that side of it as well. Whereas with UX writing and screen reader experiences, it's all on us. We have to be clear in how we're creating hierarchy of information on the screen, how we are being consistent with certain terminology through the experience, because it's the terminology that users are recognizing. It's not the shape of a button or the shape of a component.
23:54
It really is on us to create those kinds of threads between the information and so, yeah, there's a lot to do with, like I say, information hierarchy, information architecture, terminology and consistency. And specifically in terms of UX writing with screen reader experiences, it's turning those visual elements on the screen into words and explaining what those visual elements are actually conveying. Meaning wise, I feel like that's the.
24:30
Official role of the U extracting accessibility but I would say that creating simplified content for people is also about making stuff accessible and even making clear copy in specific areas, which make it as simple as so my mom could actually use booking something that is accessible, right?
24:56
Yeah, because I think that's the thing that comes through to me. For example, I run a training session with the UX writers at booking and we talk through what's expected, what is possible, how it applies into the realities of, for example, putting together a screen reader experience that feels navigable and makes sense. But so much of accessibility comes down to things and concepts that people are so familiar with anyway, just from general UX work, UX is accessibility. It's making something have fewer barriers, it's making something usable. Particularly with screen reader experiences, it can mean the difference between someone even moving from one screen to the next or not. There are degrees of accessibility where if you're not addressing certain aspects like screen reader experience, someone might just not be able to navigate other times. Like were saying with cognitive accessibility, it's a bit more nuanced, it's a bit more decision based.
26:01
It's about how do I decide that this information could be represented in ways that most people could take it in? There are elements around colorblindness, but there are visual sides of it. Deaf people appreciate a more visual experience, for example, with iconography or illustrations, but it's not a true science when you get to that point. Like I say, it's a lot of nuance and it's quite interesting to get experience in.
26:32
So for people that want to be more experienced with accessibility for screen readers, and not only what type of educational material people need in order to build.
26:44
Accessibility to their work yeah, I think there are places where you can start where it's very much just orienting yourself in the space. There are YouTube channels, if you search for YouTube channels of people who show you what it's like to be blind and navigating an airport, let's say, or just day to day using technology like screen readers, you have Google and Apple have channels where they explain the kind of intricacies of working with accessible methodologies. But yeah, I think even just trying it out yourself, if you go on your mobile phone and you go into the accessibility section, there, you can activate a screen reader and then you can actually just see what it sounds like to navigate an app. That's something I've been focusing on with UX writers at Booking, really trying to help people understand how a screen reader sounds. Because that can be a bit jarring to get used to for a writer, because you are in control of the unique aspect of the element that the screen reader is, I suppose, focused on.
28:00
So, for example, if the screen reader moves on to a button, the screen reader already knows it's a button, you might create the copy that goes on to the button, but you're not expected to also say that this is a button. You're not expected to say, you need to double click on this button. So there's a bit of a learning curve around what is already inherently being recognized by the UI and what the role of the UX writer is. So, yeah, get used to it, play around with it. There are, like I say, resources on YouTube where you can see how it all works. You can play around with it yourself. The WCAG guidelines, like I say, are international and trusted as the source of truth around what is expected of creating an accessible product. It just can be kind of tricky to trawl through the WCAG guidelines and find what is relevant to UX writing.
29:02
Let's say that's one of the things that we've been focused on, Booking, is trying to find those things and make them clear to people.
29:10
And do you test it somehow? Like, how do you even test it? How do you know that? Basically, it's easy for a screen reader. Just see how it sounds, listen how it sounds in the screen reader. But do you often bring maybe people on board to test it with them? How does it work?
29:27
Yeah, so we have a fantastic researcher on the accessibility team at Booking. I mean, I wish we could do more kind of broader experimentation as well, but the populations that you're talking about in terms of getting the feedback is they're hard to define, they're hard to find. So our researcher, she works with a company called Fable that's based in the US. I think they have particular recourse to groups of user research participants who, for example, screen reader users or users of some kind of assistive technology. So it's definitely something that we're proactive in researching how assistive technology users interact with our products and what their observations of its usability are. And then in terms of implementation, it gets tricky because, like I say, we kind of hand the reins over to the product teams themselves to be building accessible experiences. And it becomes a lot more nuanced in that way in terms of you're not implementing something purely for its accessibility.
30:41
It's kind of bundled into the whole feature that's being produced. Right? So it's harder to isolate at that point. So we do a lot of work beforehand to work out what the needs are in terms of research.
30:59
That's awesome. I'm also checking Fable right now, and it looks really cool, like a really cool platform to find your candidates for user research and so on when it comes to accessibility.
31:11
That's awesome.
31:12
All right, so we're getting into the end of the conversation, and there were a lot of great insights here about accessibility and how to test it and how to educate your company and how to do it cross function in your organization. So to those to recap, to those people who are getting into accessibility right now or educating about it in their organization. What do you think should be the first step to it?
31:39
Can be a big topic, and I think a lot of people it's quite interesting the way that products are built. I don't know if everybody's familiar with the concept of functional and non functional requirements. So a product would be built based on the functions that it needs to perform, right? So with a train company, someone would need to be able to find a ticket for a train on their product, let's say. And that's the priority. And in terms of the list of non functional requirements under which you see things like usability or levels of security, accessibility actually often falls, I think always falls in that list. So it's very easy for people to deprioritize it. And I think it's just about being able to express if you're trying to get buy in from leadership in your company around accessibility, I think you just need to be clear with people around, like I say, the degree to which accessibility can vary.
32:47
So it's not just about making a product easier to use. Some aspects of accessibility are deal breakers in terms of usability. So for a screen reader user, if your product isn't ready for a screen reader user to use it, they won't be able to use it. It's that definitive. So a lot of the time you do have to make decisions around who you are talking to in terms of leadership and what you think would ring most true with them. Like were saying at the beginning, there are lots of ways that accessibility is relevant to people's perspectives on work, on life, on humanity. It's such an important topic in that way that you maybe need to make decisions around how to make it relevant to whichever stakeholder you're talking to and making it detailed in that way. Like, for example, I say screen reader users, they really need that experience to be ready for them.
33:53
There are ways that you can level up to better accessibility, but there's always a road to follow and it always makes sense to build up to it. I think in terms of that legal point that's coming in 2025, the expectation is for people to meet the WCAG standards at AAA standard. So the standards go AAA, and AAA is the standard because people say, why not? AAA is a lot more kind of multimedia focused, and a lot of websites or apps don't have that multimedia element to it. So I think look at the WCAG guidelines and see what that AAA standard is and think about how it relates to your product and what might need to happen. And yeah, it's tricky to run audits yourself. There are definitely a lot of accessibility companies out there, kind of freelance contract companies that can run audits for you on your product.
34:57
Several of them you can just find through Google. So. Building up that kind of evidence base. This is what we should do. Think about the timeline of things. That's probably the best way of approaching it for getting your company on board. I would say worst case scenario, can.
35:13
Always use the Beyonce and Domino's example, right?
35:17
Exactly.
35:19
So we have this Accessibility Action plan for the European Union. Is it similar to the GDPR? Does it mean that every company in the world basically would have to comply to it?
35:29
In a way, it is very similar in terms of how GDPR happened. This European directive is coming and we have to comply with it. So it's definitely something that should be in terms of I think we talk about priorities at your company and just basic realities at your company. There are aspects of accessibility that are realities. We should start there, if you haven't started already. And like I say, I've got into accessibility and seen how beneficial it can be for me as a UX writer to flex the skills there and deepen the skills there. And I would hope that other people would see that as they deepen their confidence in the topic. And, yeah, there's a much brighter future I think that we're moving towards where we're not so focused on legal aspects and it's really the positives that we're focusing on.
36:31
All right, Jamie. Fascinating stuff. I'm also positive about the future in a way. I hope that singularity is not going to come and AI is not going to beat us all or something in general, I'm positive. Let's circle back to the beginning of the conversation and the beginning of your career, where you were a tour guide talking in a different language to this day, where you work in accessibility expert, principal, UX writing and content designer at Booking. So let's talk about the overlap between what you do today, what you did then, and localizing your products to different markets.
37:06
I think it's all connected well, yeah, because we have for UX writing at Booking, we have a framework of skills that people can be developing in the career and accessibility and localization fit in similar section of that framework around implementation and working with different audiences. And I think it's similar to localization in a way because it's the awareness of how your work at a certain point with UX writing, your work becomes technical, it becomes kind of mechanical around the usage of words. How am I going to string this together in a way that makes sense, but also how do I make it make sense when it gets localized into 40 something languages? And I think it's also the perspective that you can have with accessibility, where you're going to be writing an experience for well, and you're thinking already about how is this experience going to be interpreted, how is someone going to understand it if they don't have any of the visual context on the screen at all?
38:17
There's no boxes, headers, colors, symbols, icons, and you have to be able to structure your copy in a way that still will make sense in that context. It's also the element with screen reader experiences where, like I mentioned, a screen reader will know if a component is a button or a tab or how many tabs there are, and it will say those things alongside the copy that you've written. And it's got this kind of particular syntax to it that you just have to make do with and make your copy work with. So it is that kind of exercise of thinking through the syntax and kind of the interactional grammar of a product. Yeah. It's a fun brain teaser a lot of the time.
39:11
That's awesome and localization. It's another story for another day. We could talk about that at least one more hour.
39:19
Yeah.
39:20
Jamie, it was a lot of fun to have you here today.
39:24
Thank you.
39:25
A question that I asked a lot of my guests here is how do you think we should name this episode?
39:32
Now, I don't want you.
39:37
I know that many writers prefer to think about it, take their time, they have their own processes, I get it. But this is some kind of a question that ask we can brainstorm it together. I would suggest something about accessibility, obviously.
39:53
No. Let's call it monster trucks. Was there anything that really stuck out to you that was unexpected that I said? Like I say, a lot of it.
40:04
Can feel familiar well for you because you live and breathe it. For me. No. I barely knew how to write it. The way you write it was not for me. I wasn't familiar with it. Right. With the A eleven y yeah, exactly. The most surprising thing for me was the fact that by the law of the European Union, everyone would must comply to the Web Accessibility Action Plan. So obviously we can make it dramatic and say something like, prepare for the accessibility apocalypse. Right.
40:45
I wouldn't go that far. You don't want people panicking. Don't break the law. I would prefer to frame.
40:53
Right.
40:54
Yeah. The most positive element of this entire field, let's say, for UX writing, is that idea that accessibility is the purest exercise in content design. So if you could think of something along those lines, go for it.
41:14
I think so it's something like accessibility for better UX writing, or something like that.
41:19
Yeah, because it's just the UX writer. You're really independently structuring everything for these users and thinking through the kind of nuanced ways that people take information, how that needs to be structured. It's fascinating. Make of it what you can.
41:39
Jamie, it was amazing talking to you today. Jamie walk. I'll add your LinkedIn information on the Bio on description, if that's okay with you. Thank you for being here today.
41:50
Yeah, thank you for having me. Hope it's been interesting.
41:53
Of course. It was fascinating. Thank you to all of the listeners that stick until the end of the episode. I appreciate your work. I would also appreciate your feedback. So reach out, give me feedback. Put five stars on spotify. If you liked it, share it with your team so they would know also about accessibility and the Web Accessibility Act and why it's important and how to make your product more accessible to more people. And check the UX writing hub website. We have free UX Writing course and also a lot of content that we give for people for free. That's about it. See you next time. Bye.