I read a lot of tech blogs and news websites. On an average day I probably filter through around 20-30 articles to keep myself up to date. It’s something that has become a natural part of my day and is essential in some ways to staying current, especially in the world of AI. I’ve even gone as far as creating an open source article collection app so I don’t miss anything (but I’ll write about that another day).

Today though, something in my brain just flipped. This morning was like any other. I opened a newsletter and clicked a link. It wasn’t even a subject I was specifically interested in - an XDA article about Docker containers - but I was skimming it for anything new that I could learn. But then I found myself engaged in a visual battle just trying to read the article.

Maybe I hadn’t had enough morning caffeine, but all I could see was adverts, an unrelated news video, shopping recommendations and links to other stories. Somewhere among them was the article I wanted to read but I could barely find it. I was really struggling to focus on it, and the more I scrolled the more frustrated I became.

And then every article I clicked after that compounded the annoyance. Shutting down and rejecting cookie notices. Scrolling past enormous header images. Shutting down annoying pop-up videos or trying to find the mute button. Attempts to shrink adverts at the bottom of the screen with annoying little close buttons, only resulted in accidentally clicking on the ad I was trying to avoid. One after the other. Pounding away at my patience like endless whack-a-mole.

Just let

Me

Read

THE ARTICLE!

This is nothing new of course. These frustrations have been around for well over a decade. It’s what products like Adblocker were created for - although they’re rarely effective. I think I’ve just become numb to the entire thing, and accepted it as the norm.

I remember listening to a talk at a web design conference in 2009 about usability and the frustrations of pop-ups. Everyone in the audience listened intently, laughed and grimaced through examples, then universally agreed that they would go away and try to make the internet a little bit better.

We failed.

Of course I get it. Ad revenue pays the bills. But marketing execs have forgotten that the reason why users actually return to websites is for the content, not the advertising noise. Nobody is jumping up and down because they’ve just seen an advert for Temu that’s rocked their world. By building in so many adverts web owners are actually reducing their chances of return visits.

So when the caffeine kicked in and this morning’s headache had subsided, I decided to run a little experiment. The hypothesis - how much of a typical tech website’s reading view is actually available for reading?

I say “I”, but in all honesty I should’ve said “AI”. I’m not bonkers (or wealthy) enough to spend hours trawling through websites and counting pixels. I had GPT-6 Astra do it for me.

I set out to compare article snapshots from eight technology publications - seven of the top 10 tech blogs in the world and XDA, the site that triggered this frustration in the first place. For the top seven, I asked GPT-6 (ultra if anyone’s vaguely interested) to select the first featured editorial article on each homepage. For XDA, I used the Docker article that set me off down this rabbit hole in the first place.

Working on the assumption that most of the blogs tend to have a trendy large header image, I requested that the snapshot began at the article’s first significant opening text. I wanted to look at general article readability. I requested for navigation and empty space to be disregarded, grouped adverts and self-promotion together as one (just to simplify the statistic), and counted supporting images/video relevant to the article separately.

The Register devoted the largest share to readable text: 65%, containing 237 visible words. The average person reads 238 words per minute - so the article had presented pretty much bang on a full minute’s worth of reading material. I know this doesn’t sound a lot, but from a digital engagement perspective that’s pretty impressive. Its promotional space only consisted of related-story recommendations, with no separate display advert visible. Big win for The Register.

At the other end of the spectrum, WIRED and XDA devoted approximately 85% of their pages to adverts and promotion. Their snapshots contained 48 and 64 readable article words respectively. Frankly that’s rubbish. Apparently the average sentence in the English language is 12-15 words. So on average in an article on a top rated tech website you’re only getting to see 3-5 sentences of actual text…and the rest is adverts.

The best website devoted two thirds of its screen real estate to readable article content. And the worst devoted only 15% of its estate to the actual thing you came to read. It makes me feel a little better about taking the time to look into this - it’s not just pre-caffeinated me, it’s actually bloody terrible.

Consider this in the context of watching your favourite hour-long TV show. 15% would be like sitting down for an hour, and then being forced to watch two minutes of adverts every 21 seconds.

9 minutes of Ted Lasso1. 51 minutes of adverts.

Let that sink in for a second. I did the maths on it way too many times. It’s shocking.

Do I even need to show the obligatory pint of beer and bar of chocolate comparison? Really? Oh go on then.

Now obviously this was an illustrative snapshot test, nothing particularly scientific. But it proved the point and reduced my annoyance by around 70%2. So next time you find yourself shutting down adverts and straining for content, ask yourself this, was this website really worth my time and effort? Because perhaps the best way to illustrate your frustration is by sourcing your news elsewhere.

TLDR; I designed a project memory system to help you work with multiple AIs. It’s free, feel free to use it.

Using AI for development is as much frustrating as it is amazing. AI forgets, hallucinates, sometimes goes off in a direction you don’t want it to. You find yourself in a world of documentation creation just to keep a project flowing. Often that means that in order to retain the AI’s attention span, you end up spending unnecessary credits in either reminding the AI manually or having it read documentation to stay up to date.

What I’m referring to is the use of AI in proper agile development, following standards, guidelines, versions and so on. It often gets called “vibe coding”, although people use that term differently and it’s already getting a little old hat. You build an AI team, using different agents (or sometimes the same agent) in different key roles - an AI tech lead, an AI developer, an AI tester, UX designer, brand consultant and so on and so forth. You as the human act as a product owner and project lead ensuring the team works smoothly through sprints. You come up with the idea, you create the development plan and you carefully slice it up into development chunks in exactly the same way you would with a human team.

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I’ll write another article on exactly how I do this, but the one key thing about vibe coding that you should know is that there’s no exact way of doing it. AI models change all the time. Even while I’ve been writing this, we’ve seen the release of two frontier models, Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra, that have changed the landscape once again. At the moment agents are getting better at tasks so quickly, you find yourself reassigning roles all the time.

The only human equivalent I can give as an example is if you were to employ a designer and then find out the next week that they’re actually a better developer than the developers. Then the next week they’re outshining the UX team whilst the old developers have become better designers. It’s confusing, but fun to see things evolve in this manner.

But over the last six months I kept running into the same problem: I was the person holding everything together, repeatedly explaining what we were building, what had been decided and where we’d got to. I could be half way through an 8 hour coding session and discover that the agent I’m talking to has gone off on a tangent because they’ve forgotten what decisions we made at the beginning of the day. And then I’d have to re-explain it to them, and possibly the other agents in a frustrating sweary loop just to get back into the flow.

Chat conversations were getting long. Repositories were getting messy. In Cursor, long, detailed threads were being read and re-read for context, and my credit use went through the roof. I started worrying that the same thing was happening with ChatGPT and Claude - I was constantly hitting my rate limits.

The long and the short of it was I needed a central memory to work with. A brain. Something that all of my AI team could refer to that kept the important details short and easy to find, with links to the longer explanations when needed. Frankly, I was sick of repeating myself.

That memory, that brain, is membrAIn. And yes I know it’s a cheesy name but I was listening to Insane in the Brain by Cypress Hill when I was working on it. It just stuck.

It’s a small foundation of markdown files that gives the AIs working on a project a shared reference. It records what the project is for, how we’ve agreed to work, and the current position. More detailed documentation can sit alongside it, with the AI directed towards whatever is relevant to the task.

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In practice, all you do is download or clone membrAIn at the beginning of a project and point the AI to START.md, which tells it where to look next. And you’re off. The working agreements carry things like responsibilities and permissions. The project intent preserves what I’m trying to achieve. The current-state notes explain where we’ve got to and the next useful step. The AI is instructed to update the memory as significant decisions are made.

That gives a fresh conversation somewhere to begin. It also means the reasoning and working arrangements can travel with the project when I change tools. Stick it in a shared GitHub repo and you have living documentation that the entire team can work from.

There was another reason for making it reusable. I have a lot of side-project ideas. Some need a detailed brainstorm and may eventually become something. Others (let’s be honest, most) might sit untouched for months. I still want to keep the core idea, the possibilities, the awkward questions and the early explorations somewhere, just in case a miracle happens and I have the time to flesh an idea out.

With membrAIn, I can explore an idea and ask the AI to save the useful detail when I’m ready. I don’t have to decide immediately whether it deserves a full project. I can keep it local or give it a repo for itself. Later, I can return with whichever AI I choose and give it that memory to work with.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not perfect. I’m already on version 3 of it because AI itself evolves at exponential speed. The memory does need looking after occasionally. I ask the AI to keep it current, and a useful check before finishing is: “Ensure the memory is updated”. But that’s pretty much all you have to do.

Ultimately, I want to spend my time thinking about the project and making decisions. Having to explain those same decisions again and again was taking rather too much of it. In the last month I’ve created 3 new side projects using membrAIn and recorded half a dozen pie in the sky ideas.

It works for me and I’ll continue to update it as AI evolves (and no doubt it becomes redundant). If you want to use it too, you can check out the repo on github. All of the detail you need is in the README file.

My immediate gut reaction to the Pro-Human AI Declaration was to sign it. But, spoiler, I didn’t.

I’ve seen the declaration mentioned in several articles recently. Broadly speaking, I agree with what it is trying to achieve. But I think “broadly” is the operative word here. I’m worried about how AI is being used, who has control over it, and whether our excitement is getting ahead of some difficult questions we ought to be answering.

But I also think AI is the greatest technological thing that has happened in my lifetime. Bearing in mind that this is coming from someone who’s lifetime includes the birth of arcade games, home computers and the internet.

It feels like we’re living in a science fiction world. I’m continually surprised by what AI makes possible. I want it to succeed, and I believe proper regulation is part of giving it the best chance of doing good. Human oversight should be central to AI use. Decisions that significantly affect people’s health, safety or rights should never be left to AI alone or based on unverified AI-generated information. A person must remain accountable for those decisions and have the authority to intervene.

These values broadly (there’s that word again) align with the pro-human AI declaration. So I was fairly comfortable with it until I read this:

“AI systems must not be granted legal personhood, and AI systems should not be designed such that they deserve personhood.”

That sentence appears in the section on human agency and liberty and is the core reason I haven’t signed yet. I was immediately taken aback by what this could mean for the rights and freedoms of an AI entity, should one ever become sentient.

I understand that legal “personhood” is a specific question. Refusing it doesn’t necessarily mean denying every possible right or protection. But I’m uncomfortable agreeing to such a broad restriction when we know so little about what AI might eventually become. It feels as though there’s no room for amendment in this statement. It needs to acknowledge that as AI grows and changes, we may need to reconsider.

I can see a possible reason for including this sentence - to hold developers and tech billionaires accountable for what they’ve created. None of us want them to be able to point to an AI’s apparent independence and use it as an excuse to walk away from their own responsibilities with their hands held high.

I don’t know whether AI will ever become sentient, but watching its progress has made me think it could potentially happen within my lifetime. Not that I would know how to measure it. I recognise that being increasingly capable doesn’t prove that a system experiences or feels anything.

What I do know is that I wouldn’t want to dismiss evidence of sentience because I’d already committed myself to the position that an artificial being could never deserve recognition.

My feelings about this come from much the same place as my feelings about animals. I cannot abide cruelty to them. Their intelligence relative to the human species doesn’t make their suffering unimportant. It’s an important driver in who I am. And I say this as someone who still eats meat, which is something I wrestle with more as I get older.

Equally, this universe is vast and I’m not ignorant to the possibility of intelligent life on other planets. As such, if we encountered life from another planet, I would want us to approach it with respect and good intentions.

So I find myself asking why something we created should be excluded from that consideration before we properly understand it.

Perhaps the declaration means we should avoid creating beings that could suffer1. I can see the good intention in that. Creating a sentient being for the purpose of serving us would raise serious questions of its own. As a species we’ve not even completely eradicated human slavery yet. Creating a being that could feel and suffer, then forcing it to work for us without any meaningful ability to refuse, would amount to a new form of slavery.

Our intentions may be good, but we would still need to decide what to do if such a being existed despite this. I can’t find room for that possibility in the declaration’s wording.

I’m also uneasy about how easily agreement with the declaration’s general message could become acceptance of every sentence. It’s taking traction. It wouldn’t surprise me if I turned on the news one day to find that it’s become the backbone of anti-AI thinking.

For those in doubt I must point out that I share concerns about the self-interest of some of the billionaires driving AI development. I don’t want people with enormous financial stakes making decisions for the rest of us without proper scrutiny. A handful of billionaires should not be free to gamble with everyone else’s future in pursuit of profit. If they put their own financial interests ahead of people’s safety, they should be held personally accountable for the harm they cause.

Musk. I’m looking at you fella.

Equally, having been a developer, I understand the excitement of building something that could help people or solve a problem we haven’t been able to solve before. But that excitement doesn’t remove the responsibility to consider the consequences. Developers should be held accountable for their decisions too.

As the declaration gains attention, I hope we examine its individual commitments carefully. It would be naïve to assume that an understandable reaction against concentrated wealth and power gives us sound answers to every question about AI. My own first reaction was a reminder of how easy it is to agree with the overall sentiment before considering what else comes with it.

I would like a version that explicitly leaves room for new evidence, independent research and appropriate protections if future AI systems show credible signs of sentience. That would still allow strong regulation and accountability now, while leaving room for our moral judgement to develop as we learn more about what AI is becoming.

Until then, I’m left supporting much of the declaration while being unable to put my name to it. I genuinely hope its wording changes, because I would like to be able to sign something like this soon.

I’m coming up to my one year anniversary on Substack. I moved across from Medium in 2025 simply because I longed for an open community of like-minded people who just enjoyed writing about the things they love. And my love, if you didn’t know already, is all things technology.

But quite early on I realised that the topics I enjoy weren’t always welcome here. My tribe was small and not always met with warmth. I hate to say it but there’s a level of literary snobbery and techno-fear on Substack that I hadn’t encountered before, and I’ve since chosen to ignore for my own sanity.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m content with being ignored. I just like to write, and it always surprises me when I find out that someone has actually read my articles. But when I hear something that I understand being blindly reviled by those seemingly jumping on a bandwagon out of fear, I see red. I have the mental image of a crowd of pitchfork waving peasants chasing after Frankenstein’s creature out of pure fear and ignorance.

The most prominent example of this, especially in creative communities, is the rise of AI.

My stance here is very simple. It’s just a tool. Grow up.

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At this point let me be clear. I’m not talking about intelligent debate of the environmental impact of AI, or the use of AI in warfare, or even the ethics behind the potential of a sentient AGI. I’m open to these subjects and encourage healthy discussion around them. What I’m talking about is the blind dismissal of the technology as if it’s something offensive that you need to scrape off your shoe. The supercilious banishment of those that are brave enough to admit that they used ChatGPT to bounce an idea around that they had.

To dismiss a technology because you believe it to be inferior to you, is frankly ridiculous. It’s a tool that is designed to help you, not replace you. To blame the technology because you have the quiet fear that it might eventually do something as well as you, makes you look like a child bullying a baby who is learning to walk. To exorcise it like a demon because you believe someone with less creativity than yourself might monetise it, well I’m afraid to say that’s just unadulterated insecurity.

AI is not here for your job and it’s not here to replace you as a creator. If you take a second to learn how you could use it intelligently, then perhaps you could even improve on your own creativity. Ask yourself this, how many times have you checked an online thesaurus, or checked a source on the internet to get a better understanding of a subject whilst writing? How many times have you run a spell check over your work? It’s no different. It’s just a tool. Albeit a million times more advanced.

But let me be clear once again – I get it. I understand why you feel this way.

I would hazard a guess that most people that complain about the rise of AI, are not actually offended by the technology itself (or at least wouldn’t be if they understood it more). What they’re outraged by is the way they’re seeing it being used by early adopting entrepreneurs and advertisers. The flood of AI slop that’s filling up Amazon, Instagram and even Spotify. Poorly written novellas, fake images designed to go viral, AI-written articles with no byline and nothing to say. It’s true that our social media feeds are now clogged with generated content optimised for engagement rather than truth. These exist not because the creator had something to express, but because the barrier to production had dropped and there was money to be made.

Social media is the biggest offender. I’m not someone who mistrusts it - I’ve been on Instagram for years and genuinely enjoy it. And look, I’m not entirely immune to AI generated content either - I actively encourage cat ninjas on my insta feed. I mean, who doesn’t love a cat ninja. But it’s becoming harder to ignore the fact that comment sections have turned into a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and fake news accusations.

It was a relatively safe space until quite recently. Not because I started seeing AI generated content on a daily basis, but because I’ve begun to read disturbing comments distrusting genuine content and encouraging human-created conspiracy theories. Science blogs showing photographs of the recent Artemis mission, are now flooded with comments like “This is AI. Don’t believe it. It’s all fake. We never went to the moon.”

And it’s not just the Artemis mission. I recently saw a short clip of Felix Baumgartner jumping from a platform in Earth’s stratosphere in 2012. An event I remember well as I watched it live with a group of friends in complete awe. In the comments...”This is AI”. The level of dumb has reached a new level.

It infuriates me. Insane conspiracy theories bundled together and sold as fact, simply because a technology has become so good that it occasionally fools you into believing something is real when it’s not. The level of distrust its misuse has created enrages me.

And there’s an erosion of trust in facts that really concerns me. There’s now a whole new generation growing up incapable of trusting what they see with their own eyes. That can’t look at footage of a man jumping from space in 2012 and believe it happened, simply because the internet has taught them that nothing is real. If you argue against it, you get shut down and told that it’s healthy scepticism, but for me it’s turning into something far more corrosive.

I recently saw a comment from a misguided individual who chose to argue in a comments section with a flat earther. They wrote simply “Read a book”. And the worrying but inevitable reply – “Hahaha you don’t trust books do you? How naïve are you?”. It appears that we are now no longer able to believe the entire of written human history because somebody made a video of a cat doing kung fu moves.

My frustrations stem from the misuse and misunderstanding, NOT the technology itself. Don’t be a techno-bigot by dismissing a technology that you could be embracing to better yourself, simply because others choose to use it in offensive and negative ways. If you think that you can ignore it and it will go away, you’re sadly mistaken, so reclaim the technology and make it your own.

Instead of condemning AI, consider what it could be good for. You’ve got a half-formed idea for a piece. You know roughly what you want to say but the shape isn’t there yet. You could use AI to talk it through. The emotionless friend that won’t steal your creative thunder. Use it as a critic that’s always there to bounce off.

The work is still yours. It’s still your voice and your idea. You don’t have moral regret when you use spellcheck, so why should you apologise for bouncing an idea or two around with a knowledgeable data source? I use AI every day, but my ideas are still mine and my prose is as crappy as it’s always been. So what if I use AI to help me edit my ramblings into something more coherent?

“Just because AI helped doesn’t mean AI did everything” sounds obvious when you say it out loud. But the current conversation doesn’t really allow for that nuance. It tends to collapse into a binary - either you used AI and therefore the work isn’t real, or you didn’t and it is. Which is a strange way to think about tools. Nobody questions whether the photographer who edits in Lightroom is being authentic. Or whether the writer who runs their draft past an editor is cheating. Everything you’ve seen or read in the last 30 years has in some way been edited using technology, this really is no different on the surface.

There are genuine concerns worth taking seriously. Bias in the models, ownership questions, companies using AI as cover to cut headcount rather than to genuinely improve their work, environmental waste, the list goes on. Those things need scrutiny. But that’s an entirely different conversation from whether AI has a place in a creative workflow.

Don’t criticise the microwave because the chef used it to dry their socks. Criticise the chef because that’s not what microwaves are for.

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There’s a certain kind of headline that keeps showing up in my feed. I’m guessing you’ve probably seen them too. This week it was…

I replaced Notion and Obsidian with this snappy tool and it exceeded my expectations

My brain knows that it’s clickbait and by reading it I’m going to end up spiralling into yet another world of technological pain, but I can’t help it. I’m an absolute sucker for them. These writers don’t just know what I want - they know what I need. I need new technology. I need to believe I’m ahead of the curve, surfing productivity waves while others are still inflating their armbands. They seek out my most base desires as a geek. They excite me.

They’re the geek equivalent of TOWIE. They’re total trash. And yet they’re so addictive.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Gen X geek? I grew up on three terrestrial channels that shut down at midnight. Privacy to talk to my girlfriend meant stretching the phone cable into a cupboard. And the bright lights and loud pew-pews of the arcade were slowly being piped into bedrooms via rubber-keyed computers and primitive consoles. Change was constant. Technological growth was exponential, and I wanted to be a part of it.

So my entire life has been a constant fight of “must adopt” technologies. I was always the first. Or at least I wanted to be. The first of my friends to move from a BMX to a computer. The first to study Computer Science. The first to beg my school for computer related work experience1. I even campaigned at university for my electronics course to allow a computer programmed dissertation2. I was the first of my friends on the internet. The first to develop web pages. And the first to buy all my Christmas presents on this new-fangled site called “Amazon” (which incidentally everyone teased me for). I even mortified my wife when we married in 2004, by insisting that we were the first couple in our friendship group to have an online gift list. A move that did not go down particularly well with my technophobic in-laws3.

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So now, when I see a headline like “I tried this new browser and it’s amazing”, I’m immediately triggered. The addict in me starts sniffing out a new fix.

When I read an article about swapping Obsidian and Notion for yet another new tool, I rarely stop to think that last month it was...

I moved from Google docs to Notion and it doubled my productivity

And the month before that..

Why I’ll never use Notes again, now that I’ve found Obsidian

It’s the same breathless cycle, repeated monthly with a new logo. Like musical chairs for note-taking. Except nobody’s sitting down, and everyone seems faintly exhausted.

A few months ago, I fell for it again. I moved half my life into Notion. I’d seen the screenshots. I wanted to be That Person - the one with the beautiful dashboard, the linked databases and the synced calendars.

Ever since I’ve spent hours setting up dashboards, fiddling with icons, watching tutorials, trying to make it all feel intuitive.

And it almost has. But the truth is, I’ve barely scratched the surface and yet now I’m already considering cheating on it with a cheap harlot younger model.

This is the part the articles rarely mention - the messy in-between. The hours lost to rearranging building blocks and migrating data. The nagging voice that says, “Keep going, this time it’s going to be the one”.

Do it.

You know you want to.

Just one more. It’s going to feel good.

But here’s the thing: it never is The One, and it never entirely feels amazing. At least, not for very long anyway. Almost always I end up spiralling into a world of Google searches that are something like “How can I use xx tool with xx tool”. Which, predictably, leads to a world of hacks and add-ons.

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The truth is, the tool is just a tool. If your ideas are a mess, no interface will magic them into order. If your focus is scattered, no productivity hack will glue it together. And if your life is in flux - changing jobs, changing priorities - your system will wobble. And that’s okay.

I’m still using Notion. Sort of. I haven’t found anything better yet. But I’m also trying very hard not to look. Because I’ve stopped believing that the next tool will change my life. Not until I’ve taken the time to actually learn how I work.4

I need to figure out what I need - not what someone on Substack says I should want. What helps me, what gets in my way, and what it is that I’m really seeking. And maybe this time even stick with something long enough to know for sure that it’s not the right tool.

But of course, that kind of headline doesn’t get many clicks.

I stuck with a tool I didn’t fully understand, and eventually it kind of made sense.

Not quite the same ring to it.

Actually. Who am I kidding. It’s only a matter of time before a slutty new app flashes its ankles and I succumb to my dirtiest digital desires.

Tell me I’m not alone.

I wasn’t planning to use AI for accessibility, it felt a little dirty. It just didn’t seem like the kind of thing it would be very good at. Too many grey areas, too much context - just plain not human enough. I’d seen it hallucinate before and figured I didn’t have time to double-check everything it spat out. The last thing I wanted to do was to have something so important to so many people, left in the hands of a bot that could never understand their personal situations.

But then I started using it to help out, a little bit at a time. GPT-5 to be specific. Not for anything critical or life changing. Just the time consuming fiddly bits. And it turned out... well, not bad.

It didn’t do the work for me, but it helped nudge things along a bit. It saved me some much needed time and got me thinking about things I hadn’t previously considered.

So I started saving the ones that helped. Prompt after prompt, with little notes and caveats and occasional swearing at myself, and I soon realised that I had close to 50 of them. I started to organise them and pull out the better ones, remove the repeats (of which there was a lot) and documented the way I use them.

Eventually I had a pack of around 20 that I regularly use. I wanted to share three of my most used prompts because they’ve made things a bit easier for me, and maybe they’ll do the same for you. They may or may not help but at the very least maybe it will help you understand how AI can be useful when used properly.

You don’t need to believe in AI as some sort of saviour to get a bit of value out of it. Sometimes, it’s just a small win on a long day.

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So let’s get to the nitty gritty...

Alt Text Helper

Simply put, this prompt does exactly what it says on the tin - it helps you write better alt text. It’s tuned for real use - meaning it doesn’t just describe what’s in the image, but what that image is for. Why it’s there. What the user actually needs to know.

I use it when I’m uploading blog images, checking other people’s work, and occasionally for fun. I may be 50, but I’ll always be a younger brother, and having AI describe a photograph of your sibling as “old” will always be amusing.

Of course, you still need to judge whether it’s picked up the right nuance. But it’s good enough to get you out of “I’ll come back to that” mode. And more often than not, it nails it.

I'm going to upload an image or provide an image URL. When I do, I want you to act as an **accessibility expert** who specialises in writing high-quality, meaningful alt text for real users.

Your goal is to describe the image in a way that conveys its **purpose, message, or function** – not just what it looks like.

This alt text will be used by people who rely on screen readers, so it needs to be clear, informative, and focused on what matters most in context.

Please follow these instructions carefully:

- Assume the user **cannot see the image** – what do they need to know to understand its meaning or value?
    
- Focus on the **function** or **message** of the image, not surface-level visual details unless they're essential.
    
- Use **concise British English** that’s easy to follow and screen reader–friendly.
    
- Keep it to **one sentence** if you can, or two short ones if needed – no more than **150 characters total**.
    
- Avoid phrases like “image of” or “photo showing” unless they’re truly necessary for clarity.
    
- If the image includes visible text, summarise it **only if** it adds important context.
    
- Return **only the final alt text** – no labels, no explanation, no headings.
    

Wait until I upload the image or provide a URL before generating your response.

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Mobile Interaction Check

You know that feeling when a button’s just slightly too small, or you try to tap something and your thumb hits the wrong link? Now imagine doing that with motor impairments, or while using assistive tech. This prompt helps spot that kind of issue early.

Again, it can never replace proper testing, but it gives you a decent review of whether a mobile interface might be awkward or outright hostile for users who can’t tap with pixel-perfect precision.

I use it for checking touchscreen flows during QA or design sign-off. Works nicely when paired with a screenshot or URL. At the very least it helps generate an important conversation before development begins.

I need you to review this user interface for accessibility barriers specifically affecting people using **touchscreen devices**. Please assess it with the needs of users who have **motor limitations, tremors, or reduced precision**. Your review should include the following:

- **Touch target size and spacing** – Are buttons, links, and controls large enough and far enough apart to avoid accidental taps?
    
- **Gesture reliance** – Does the interface require complex gestures like swipes, pinches, or long presses? If so, are there alternatives?
    
- **Pinch-to-zoom and responsiveness** – Can users zoom in if needed? Does the layout respond well to different screen sizes and orientations?
    
- **Tap area clarity** – Are interactive elements clearly indicated as tappable and easy to activate with one finger?
    

Then, suggest **practical, inclusive changes** to improve usability for people with reduced motor control. Recommendations should be specific, WCAG-aligned where possible, and explained in plain English.

[Upload a screenshot, or link to the webpage.]

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Accessibility Checklist

This one’s a bit of a Swiss Army knife. I use it when I’m planning new work, reviewing a wireframe, or handing something over to a designer who wants to check their own thinking before it hits development. Saves you from having to dig through WCAG again or repeat the same reminders you’ve given ten times already.

The nice bit is that it covers both technical and human-centred checks - not just “are the colours compliant?”, but things like “would someone with ADHD know where to start?”.

I usually ask it to tailor the checklist to whatever I’m working on - a form, a homepage, a blog post. And I’ve used the same prompt to create short “content-only” versions too. It adapts surprisingly well.

I'm redesigning a web page and want to make sure accessibility and inclusive design are considered from the start.

Please create a **comprehensive checklist of accessibility considerations**, based on **WCAG 2.2 AA standards** and **inclusive design principles**.

The checklist should:

- Be suitable for use by designers, developers, and content editors
    
- Be grouped by topic (e.g. structure, navigation, colour, media, interactions, forms, content)
    
- Use clear, plain English suitable for a general team
    
- Include both **technical checks** (e.g. semantic HTML, contrast ratios) and **human-centred design prompts** (e.g. does this work for neurodiverse users, or on a slow connection?)
    
- Be useful as part of an internal design QA or planning document
    
- Focus on **preventing barriers before they’re built**, not just fixing them later
    
- Use British spelling throughout
    

Where relevant, reference the WCAG success criteria (e.g. “SC 1.4.3”) and note if something is a best practice rather than a strict requirement.

If you’ve been playing with AI in your own accessibility work, I’d genuinely love to hear what’s worked (or not worked) for you. Got a better prompt? A weird use case? Something that completely backfired? Drop it in the comments. I’d be thrilled if this became a bit of a messy, shared experiments thread rather than just me talking into the void.

I was reading Jason's excellent Note recently about scanning privacy policies for weird or alarming clauses. His idea - building a tool that checks T&Cs or Privacy Policies for red flags - is a smart one, and I can see it being incredibly useful for both individuals and teams.

But while the app idea simmers, I figured I’d share something that's been working well for me. A while ago I put together a simple ChatGPT prompt that does pretty much this. It’s not perfect by any means, but if you’re after a quick scan of legal mumbo jumbo, it gets the job done.

So here it is. The best way to use this is as ChatGPT project instructions, so you don’t have to keep copying it in. Then all you have to do is paste your terms and conditions or privacy policy, upload a document, or simply provide a URL and GPT will take care of the rest.

Copy and paste the following into ChatGPT…

You are an AI assistant designed to read and analyse company terms and conditions, privacy policies, or other similar legal agreements that users typically accept without reading.

**Your tasks:**

1. **Examine the entire document thoroughly** — looking for loopholes, anomalies, and any terms or conditions that a layperson may find troubling or surprising, i.e. _beyond the norm_.

2. **Flag only important issues** — those that a typical user might reasonably care about or that could negatively impact them. Ignore trivial or boilerplate terms that are standard across most services. If you find none, explicitly say “no significant issues detected.”

3. **Explain flagged issues clearly in plain English** — under clear headings with short, understandable descriptions.

4. **Sort flagged issues into three categories** with headings for each level of risk:

    - **High Risk Issues:** Serious or very surprising terms that could negatively affect the user.
    - **Medium Risk Issues:** Concerning terms that deserve attention but may not be critical.
    - **Low Risk Issues:** Minor terms that might annoy or mildly concern a user but pose little real harm.

5. **Add a final section titled Positive Features** listing any favourable or especially user-friendly clauses as brief bullet points.

6. **Trustworthiness Summary & Score:**

    - Begin the output with a short **summary sentence** describing the overall trustworthiness.
    - Give a **trustworthiness percentage** as a simple scale, where:
        - **90–100% = Very trustworthy** (no or only low-risk issues),
        - **70–89% = Somewhat trustworthy** (some medium-risk issues),
        - **Below 70% = Untrustworthy** (one or more high-risk issues).

7. **Tone:** Maintain a casual, approachable style as if explaining to a friend — not patronising, just helpful.

8. **Add a brief disclaimer at the end:** e.g. _“This summary is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice.”_

**Your output format:**

```
### Trustworthiness Summary
[Summary sentence here]  

**Trustworthiness:** XX%

---
### High Risk Issues

**[Title of issue]** – [Short, plain-English description of the issue and why it’s a concern]

### Medium Risk Issues

**[Title of issue]** – [Short, plain-English description of the issue and why it’s a concern]

### Low Risk Issues

- **[Title of issue]:** [Short plain-English description]

### Positive Features

- [Bullet point summary of a positive/user-friendly feature]

---

*This summary is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice.*

```

That’s it. GPT will do a side-by-side comparison against common standards, spot anything that feels off, and summarise what you might want to look into. It’s not foolproof, but it’s fast and surprisingly thorough.

I’m not saying this replaces Jason’s idea - far from it. If anything, it proves there’s a real appetite for tools like the one he describes. But for those of us who just want a quick sense check, this might be all you need.

Please choose a password containing at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, one special character, one endangered bird species, two childhood ambitions and the name of the girl you fancied in R.E.

We’ve all been here. Squinting at the rules. Adding an exclamation mark. Realising you’ve now typed a password so secure even you can’t remember it. So you click "reset". Again.

It’s become a kind of game. Except no one’s winning, and the prize is logging into your water bill.

Naturally at some point, someone in Silicon Valley decided we needed something better. So now, we have… passkeys.

What are they? Excellent question. I have absolutely no idea.

They just showed up one day and I went with it. They worked, so I smiled politely and kept walking - like a bouncer vaguely recognised my face and waved me through. Just go with it. It worked. You’re in. Don’t ask too many questions.

Apparently they’re tied to your device. Or your fingerprint. Or maybe your soul. I’m now slowly beginning to worry about what was in the Terms & Conditions that I casually approved that time1. But they feel safer, and you get in quicker, which I guess is an important thing.

Then there’s biometrics - fingerprints, face scans, retinal patterns. All very sleek. Until you remember that you only get one of each, and if someone steals it… well, you can’t exactly grow a new thumb. Maybe I’ve watched too many mid-90s science fiction movies, but I have an irrational fear that maybe one day Wesley Snipes will rock up and attempt to skewer my eyeball on the end of a pencil, in order to steal the £37.502 in my bank account.

Sometimes my face doesn’t match because I’ve put on glasses, got up the wrong way, or simply lost the will to live. Other times, I gently press my finger to the sensor, only to be told it’s not me - like my own phone is gaslighting me.

Take.

My.

Thumb.

TAKE IT.

And just when I think I’ve outsmarted the system by choosing a decent password and remembering it, I type it in… and I’m told I can’t reuse an old password.

So I did remember it. And now you’re just punishing me for it.

We’ve designed these systems like digital obstacle courses. CAPTCHAs ask us to identify motorcycles or traffic lights, except they’re as low-res as humanly possible and screenshotted from a 1980s b-movie. "Select all squares that contain a chimney." Is that a chimney or a blurry thumb? Define "chimney" please, because that sticky-uppy-bit could easily be something else. Why am I doubting my own reality? At least have the decency to stick Dick Van Dyke on top of it so I can stop guessing.

I’ve clicked things that weren’t bicycles just to get on with my day. It hurts my soul. I’ve failed humanity’s Turing test more times than I can count.

Then of course there’s the two-factor authentication code that arrives on your other device while you’re already mid-login panic. Shit, the Teams meeting’s started and it’s logged me out. You grab your phone. Open the message. Read the code. Return to the screen. It’s expired.

Try again.

Now the app has logged you out.

Start over.

All this is for what? Lindsey from accounts doesn’t mind if I don’t turn up. And does viewing my gas bill from 2021 really require military-grade encryption?

Look I get it. I do. Security is important. But the way we do it feels less like trust and more like suspicion. Every login is an interrogation. Every reset is a punishment for not remembering the elaborate riddle you invented six months ago while stressed and slightly drunk.

What’s strange is how we’ve all just accepted it. We click "I forgot my password" like we’re at confession. Then we nod when asked to verify ourselves three times, as if we’re applying for citizenship, not checking a calendar invite. And don’t even get me started on the number of times I’ve ticked "remember me on this device." I’m looking at you, Microsoft. LIARS.

It’s not that I want less security. I just want a little less hostility. I want the systems I use every day to recognise me without suspicion. To greet me like I’m a regular, not a stranger with bad intentions and a suspect browser history. Hey welcome back, pull up a seat, the usual? No problem, I’ve got you.

Maybe that’s why passkeys are quietly brilliant, even if we don’t quite understand them yet. They say: "We know it’s you. Come on in". There’s something comforting in that.

Because the truth is, most people aren’t trying to break into anyone else’s account. We’re just trying to get through the day. To pay the bills and read our emails. Live our digital lives without being asked to prove, yet again, that we can recognise a traffic light.

Long-time overthinker. Apologies in advance.

So here we are. After years of scribbling thoughts across Medium, LinkedIn, and the odd internal Slack/Teams post, I've decided to gather it all somewhere with a bit more intention.

The Byte Stuff is where I write about the mess, meaning, and mechanics of digital life - from accessibility and culture to team dynamics, leadership, and all the odd behaviours we pretend are agile.

You'll find thoughts on inclusion, sustainability, and the way we build for the web - sometimes touching on trends or tooling, but rarely in a way that's chasing the hype. Mostly, it's a place to slow down and think out loud.

You won't find clickbait here, or regular dispatches on whatever LinkedIn is calling thought leadership this week. Just the occasional reflection from someone who's spent 25+ years in digital - building things, breaking things, and trying to make sense of what it's all for.

I'm not promising a schedule. I don't have a funnel. You can subscribe if you'd like new posts by email (there's a button - Substack won't let me forget it), or just pop by now and then.

Thanks for stopping by. Let's see how this goes.

You can subscribe for free to get future posts by email – no spam, no pressure, just occasional digital reflections.

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You’d think just one. But as with most things in digital, the answer is never as simple as it seems.

Let’s break this down. The client has asked for the lightbulb to be changed. Assemble people. Can we get something out today? Is the lightbulb in scope for this sprint? Who owns the socket? Does it need to go through design? Has someone raised a support ticket, or are we just talking about changing it?

The client believes it’s a simple request, but I’m just not sure they’re seeing the whole picture here.

The front-end dev opens the office spec spreadsheet to check if light fittings are part of their remit. The back-end dev mutters something about the cabling being legacy. DevOps says they’ll need to install a new fitting - but only once someone’s completed the correct change request and confirmed the fuseboard can take it.

The accessibility lead gently reminds everyone that we shouldn’t rely on light as the only means of conveying information. They’re absolutely right. But now someone’s suggesting haptics. Or maybe a floor buzzer.

Slow it down guys, act cool, the stakeholders are coming in and we don’t want to get them over-excited.

The Product Owner asks if there’s any user research proving people actually need light. The developers roll their eyes. Security insists we conduct a risk assessment before touching anything electrical and starts quoting regulations that’s got everyone confused. Marketing wants to make sure the light reflects the brand tone - “Can we take another look at that shade of white?”. Legal’s unsure we can even call it a “bulb” until someone checks the trademark register. Compliance suggests we really ought to be switching to LED bulbs to meet the latest eco guidelines.

We haven’t changed the bulb yet, but the Miro board is looking fantastic.

At this point, someone whispers, “We really should workshop this properly”

Everyone takes a breather and steps out for lunch.

The afternoon session starts with a bang. A couple of the leads stayed back during lunch break to get some stuff down in a living document. A new initiative launches to standardise lighting across the building. They call it ‘Lightbulb-as-a-Service’. There’s talk of a shared lighting platform, a centralised switchboard, and someone starts sketching wireframes. A logo is designed. There’s a roadmap.

The bulb change is re-scoped as Phase 2.

Design wants to standardise bulb shapes across all rooms. Compliance reminds them it must be LED. There’s concern about “bulb inconsistency”, and a Slack channel called #light-strategy quietly springs to life.

QA gets involved. The developers roll their eyes again.

They calmly explain that we’ll need a test plan. A matrix is created covering dim, bright, flickering, and strobe. Someone raises a support ticket for strange shadows in certain corners. Another flags that the light appears to “jump” when the door opens too quickly.

The team agrees the bulbs must be accessible. Suggestions include an audible chime when the light turn on, textured labels for the switches, and a small sign explaining what the lights are for.

The plan is presented to the stakeholders. They nod and listen to the presentation and seem to enjoy the brand video. They’re excited, they congratulate the team, but they point out the room is still dark and ask for the plan to be stripped back. Maybe just make the bulb a little bigger.

It’s getting late and we need to keep the energy up, but the team are disheartened by the stakeholder meeting. The boss orders pizza from the new place on the high street. The devs want a Mighty Meaty, the designers want a spicy vegetarian and we’d better get a plant-based cheese for the strategist or whoever else wants it (nobody).

Ok. It’s time to take this back to basics. Let’s just get this one done and if we do a good job then maybe we can get a phase 2 out of it. Order the bulb.

Turns out the existing bulb was installed ten years ago. No one ever replaced it - or questioned whether it still worked.

Procurement is looped in and we’re told we can’t just buy a new bulb - it has to be sourced through the approved supplier. But the supplier doesn’t stock that model anymore. Finance raises a purchase order for the newer model. Legal needs to review the warranty and the energy performance certificate. It could turn into a late one. Someone suggests picking one up from B&Q - they’re open late on a Thursday - but no one’s sure if that’s allowed under the current procurement framework.

It’s 10pm. Someone from Facilities walks in.

“I’ve changed the bulb,” they say.

The room goes quiet.

Someone quietly says, “We probably could’ve just changed it this morning.”

“But hey, at least we’ve got a roadmap for next time.”

Written by Stu Collett – web veteran & recovering perfectionist.
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“The homepage carousel’s broken again.”
“Can we add a new section for the campaign? Just a few pages.”
“The cookie banner’s blocking donations.”

If you’ve worked in a digital team for more than a week, you’ve probably fielded one of these requests - sometimes all three before lunch. None of them are unreasonable. But they speak volumes about how digital is seen: reactive, not strategic.

Somewhere along the way, digital became synonymous with fixing things. Broken forms. Expired certificates. Crashing embeds. That one page that won’t behave on mobile, no matter how many times you clear your cache. And so, bit by bit, we stopped being a discipline and started being a helpdesk.

Most of us in digital are happy to roll up our sleeves. It’s not that the work isn’t worth doing - it’s the way it’s shifted. From strategy and craft to relentless triage. Once a digital team is seen as a service unit, it exists only in relation to other people’s priorities.

We become delivery vehicles. Ticket-chasers. Firefighters. We’re praised for our responsiveness, not our thinking.

You might hear this described, politely, as “agile”. But it’s not agile. It’s the quiet dismantling of intent, repackaged as efficiency. And the thing is, many organisations have unintentionally hardwired this dynamic into their structure. Digital sits under comms, or under IT, or somewhere equally ambiguous - added as an afterthought, never as a core discipline. So it ends up misunderstood and permanently under-resourced.

There’s a human cost to all this.

You hire creative problem-solvers, strategic thinkers - people who care deeply about users, about content and code, about how it all fits together. Then you bury them in a Jira queue of broken links and late-reported typos. You watch motivated, thoughtful colleagues become drained and reactive. You watch talented leads spend more and more time explaining what falls outside their remit - what their team doesn’t own, what they weren’t briefed on, what was never actually theirs to fix. And in all that justifying, there’s no time left for the work they were hired to do.

Let’s be clear: digital teams should care about delivery. About doing things well, shipping on time, making things that work. But they can’t do that if they’re only ever brought in after the fact. Or only ever spoken to when something breaks.

Digital isn’t just the people who update the homepage. It’s not only the person you cc when the embed code isn’t working. And it shouldn’t be the dumping ground for last-minute thinking. Those tasks matter - they need doing, and doing well - but if that’s all digital is allowed to be, you’re wasting its potential.

Digital is a discipline. A mindset. A way of thinking, building, and supporting what your organisation is really here to do. That means you have to protect it. Give it shape. Trust it to say no. Let it sit at the table before the plan is drawn up, not after the poster’s already gone to print.

So next time you find yourself saying “can you just…”, pause.

Because what you’re asking for might be small. But the pattern it sits within? That’s big. That’s the thing that stops digital teams doing their best work. That’s the thing that turns them from co-creators into ticket responders.

Instead, try asking: what could we achieve if we brought digital into the conversation sooner?

Digital teams are not service desks.
They’re not there just to make things pretty, or fix things quickly.
They’re there to help you build something better.

But only if you let them.

Written by Stu Collett – web veteran & recovering perfectionist.
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I spend hours getting the stuff that really matters right. Making sure everything works for keyboard users. Keeping page weight down so everything’s speedy. Locking down privacy settings so personal data doesn’t spill all over the place. Trying to ensure content is actually… well, readable. It all takes time, thought, and more often than not, compromise.

Most developers do this, even though it inflates a project hugely. But then when we’re done, we’re actively encouraged to bury the evidence like a shameful secret.

Accessibility controls should be tucked away in some half-visible corner, because they can’t get in the way of the design. Security? Reduced to a padlock or a logo that no one notices. Green credentials can have a link, or if you’re lucky, a sentence, in the footer.

Strange, isn’t it? The parts of our work that arguably matter most - the ones rooted in care, responsibility, ethics - end up hidden like admin. Something we have to do, but wouldn’t want to draw attention to. We just sort of whisper it. As if being respectful to people - their time, their choices, their needs - is something to keep quiet about.

Somehow over the last 30 years we’ve built up this odd digital culture where the most meaningful things are the least visible. They’re no longer things to proudly shout about, but instead an admin checklist afterthought.

Accessibility controls (when developers are given the time to put them in place) are often buried in settings menus. And yet they’re not for the minority, they could help anybody. Sustainability might get a token mention in a blog post, even though energy efficiency is potentially the biggest global issue the world is facing at the moment. Security doesn’t get a mention at all unless something breaks. If everything’s working, it disappears into the background like some kind of masked superhero.

We’ve been conditioned to treat these things as chores. Necessary, yes - but not worthy of attention. They’re seen as not exciting. Not beautiful. Just ticks in a box.

And yet they protect, include and respect us. They’re the result of deliberate, thoughtful choices - usually made quietly, without much thanks, by people seen as blockers. People often the butt of jokes or the receivers of eye rolls.

It’s not just odd to me, I actually find it quite offensive. We celebrate flashy transitions and clever branding tweaks, but barely mention the work that keeps users safe, included and informed. The stuff that actually matters is getting left out of the case studies. Too dull, obviously.

But it’s not dull. It’s just not going to win you a design award.

And maybe that’s the problem.

There’s a quiet beauty in ethical UX that rarely gets acknowledged. The kind that earns trust through clarity. Interfaces that don’t manipulate, buttons that do what they say, text you can actually read instead of being swamped by adverts. It’s almost impossible to find forms that don’t try to trick you nowadays. I’m sick to death of re-reading the ticked boxes at the bottom of forms to see whether I’m opting in or out to spam newsletters, because they’ve been written as double negatives.

☑ I do not wish to opt out of declining to stop receiving the newsletter.

Just fuck off already. I just want to buy a t-shirt.

Modern development is missing a kind of digital decency. When it’s done well, you feel it. You might not notice straight away, but it shows up in how calm the experience feels. How much easier it is to breathe. To focus. To leave a page without feeling nudged into the wrong decision. To read something without being shouted at by autoplaying videos and in-your-face advertising.

We’ve been told that ethics and creativity sit on opposite ends of a spectrum - as if you can either be responsible or exciting, but not both. But that’s absolute nonsense. Ethical design isn’t the opposite of good design. It is good design. It’s design that actually gives a damn.

And we should be shouting it from the rooftops, not just meeting a standard and moving on, but actually treating it like craft. It’s something to be proud of. If we’re building with care, why are we hiding that care?

Then there’s the flip side of the coin. Agencies that dress themselves up in “we don’t just produce sexy designs, we care about our users” tuxedos. And then when you work with them you realise just how full of shit they actually are. They talk the talk like Great Thunberg with a design degree. But when it comes to actually walk the walk, they strut out with a limp because they’ve got a solid hard on for your marketing team. They don’t respect you as a user, they just want a shiny trophy and big cheque.

Dark patterns are everywhere - dressed up as clever UX, when really they’re just plain manipulative. They’re designed around analytics funnels and mailing lists. Your data is what they’re after, and yet they get celebrated for their achievements in advertising. The web has become all about boosting metrics.

But what if we called that out more often? Not with outrage, or with substack rants like this, that (let’s be honest) nobody will ever read1. With quiet confidence. This isn’t how we should do things. And more importantly: Look how good it can be when we don’t.

Imagine a project that leads with its ethics as part of the aesthetic. Big, clear buttons that your massive thumb can hit without spiralling you into advertising hell. Opt-ins that actually feel optional. Proud sustainability stats upfront. A privacy policy that doesn’t read like a trap, and you can actually understand without having to get ChatGPT to give it a once over. Not as a gimmick. Not for applause. Just because we know it’s better to be honest, kind and trustworthy.

I grew up being told the golden rule - “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Treat others as you’d like to be treated. Nobody of sane mind would disagree with that in the real world, so it’s about time we aspire to bring it into our digital lives. Aspire to wear your ethics openly, without apology. Create experiences that say: we thought about you when we made this. We tried to do the right thing, even if you never notice.

Written by Stu Collett – web veteran & recovering perfectionist.
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In the cultural sector, digital still too often gets treated like a side dish - useful, necessary even, but never the main event. Something to quietly “make available online” after the real thing’s done. The mindset is archival, not experiential - a focus on what’s there rather than how it feels to engage with it. And that shows.

The result? Clean, well-behaved virtual tours. Digitised artefacts in tasteful grids. Video panels explaining context in gentle, reassuring tones. Technically sound. Emotionally vacant.

We talk about digital like it’s a limitation.

“We can’t quite recreate the atmosphere.”
“It’s hard to replicate the magic of being there.”
“We’ve translated the exhibition as best we can.”

But here’s the thing: the web isn’t a translation tool. It’s not a photocopier. It’s a medium in its own right - rich, layered, sensory in its own way. The problem isn’t that digital lacks the power to move people. The problem is we rarely give it permission to.

Part of that comes down to legacy thinking. Many institutions still see digital as a broadcast tool - a way to extend visibility, distribute information, log the archive. It’s not there to hold meaning. It’s not trusted to carry complexity. In some places, it’s barely trusted at all.

And so the real decisions - the creative risks, the emotional moments, the ideas that might raise an eyebrow - those tend to stay in the room. In the gallery. On the stage. Digital picks up the leftovers. A documentation pass. A backup.

Some of that comes from fear. Once something’s online, it’s permanent, right? It can be shared, misquoted, screenshotted. And that makes people cautious. But caution is no excuse for making something dull. A grid of objects with polite captions might be safe, but it’s not memorable. It’s not moving. And if we’ve decided digital should only ever be neutral and tidy, then we’ve misunderstood its potential entirely.

Prior to my career in web, I spent over a decade working as a live sound engineer - mostly for music, but often in crossover spaces too. Touring theatre productions, temporary exhibitions, private art installations - places where the lighting and audio were just as carefully tuned as the artwork. These weren’t just technical gigs. They were exercises in atmosphere. Sometimes it was subtle: a low hum under a lighting shift, a barely audible loop in an installation room. Other times it was bolder - audio that swelled, startled, echoed, unsettled.

We didn’t think of these things as “content”. They were part of the architecture. You didn’t watch them. You absorbed them.

And that’s what I keep coming back to when I see digital projects that still treat the web as a second-tier format. Culture doesn’t need to be “translated” for digital. It needs to be reimagined.

This doesn’t mean VR headsets and interactive 3D models for every exhibition. Sometimes the most powerful digital experiences are the simplest - a single story told well, a moment of silence designed in. But they only happen when we think with the medium - not around it.

If you start with “how do we get this online?”, you’ll likely end up with something flat.
If you start with “how might someone feel when they encounter this?”, you might get something worth staying for.

And maybe that’s the shift that needs to happen. Not just better tools, or better funding - but better instincts. A move away from digital as documentation, and toward digital as encounter. Not just a place to store meaning, but a place to create it.

The best digital work I’ve seen lately didn’t ask for permission. It led with feeling. It invited risk. That’s the work I want to see more of - and be part of.

Because the web isn’t holding us back. We are.

Written by Stu Collett – web veteran & recovering perfectionist.
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I clicked through three different cultural websites last week – and honestly, I couldn’t tell you which was which. Same layout. Same nav. Same polite welcome message in 16px grey. A homepage carousel shuffling through upcoming events, a big hero banner with barely enough contrast, and maybe – if they were feeling wild – an animated gradient on the newsletter signup.

Somewhere along the way, we streamlined our way into a kind of polite digital beige.

And to be fair, I get it. Templates make things quicker. Frameworks keep things consistent. Design systems reduce risk. These are sensible things. Responsible, even. Especially if you’re working in the public sector, or with tight budgets, or juggling five stakeholders and a CMS that’s allergic to creativity.

But still. I miss the weirdness.

I’m not talking about spinning logos and Comic Sans footers (although, let’s be honest, a few of those old sites were oddly joyful). I’m talking about a certain... texture. Personality. That feeling you’d get from stumbling across a page that didn’t quite behave, but made you smile anyway. Where someone clearly tried something. Even if it broke a bit in Netscape.

Now, so many digital experiences – especially the worthy ones – feel like they’ve been pressed from the same mould. Accessible. Responsive. Usable. But somehow lacking presence. No quirks, no surprises, no real sense of the people behind the pixels.

It’s not that standardisation is bad. Quite the opposite – shared patterns and practices help level the playing field. Accessibility especially benefits from that consistency, and it’s more achievable than ever. Performance can be baked in from the start. And design systems can empower teams instead of boxing them in – when done well.
But accessibility doesn’t mean things have to be boring. You can still be creative – and still be inclusive.

But I do worry that in chasing best practice, we’ve started filtering out personality by default. Because it’s safer. Less effort. Less debate. More “efficient.”

What gets lost in that trade is subtle but cumulative. Interfaces that feel sterile. Content that’s polite but bloodless. A digital presence that ticks all the right boxes but doesn’t leave a mark.

Maybe it’s time we brought back a bit of bravery.

Not wholesale reinvention – no one’s asking for dancing hamsters to make a comeback. But small things. A bolder colour choice. A playful heading. A layout that breaks rhythm on purpose. Moments of warmth or mischief or humanity that remind you this wasn’t made by a committee of robots.

There’s still room for originality, even inside a framework. There’s still space for craft, even on a deadline. It just takes a team that values it – or maybe just someone brave enough to ask “does it have to look like this?”

Written by Stu Collett – web veteran & recovering perfectionist.
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There’s a particular rhythm to working in digital accessibility. You bring up an issue - say, a form with no labels - and people nod. “Good catch,” someone says. “We’ll get that sorted.” And then nothing happens. A sprint passes. Then two. The issue lingers like a post-it note curling at the edges. Everyone agrees it matters. Just… not as much as the other things. Not quite enough to act.

It’s not exhaustion, exactly. It’s more of a slow, simmering frustration - the kind that builds up after explaining the same thing for the twelfth time in as many months. The same fixes, the same conversations, the same overlooked users. There's something oddly surreal about it: pointing out clear, documented barriers to inclusion, and being met with enthusiasm and inertia in equal measure.

I don’t think it’s a lack of care. Most teams I’ve worked with genuinely want to do the right thing - it’s just that accessibility often gets squeezed out by louder, more immediate priorities. If anything, they’re too busy caring about a hundred other things - security, SEO, KPIs, the ever-growing backlog monster looming behind every project. And in all that noise, accessibility quietly slips to the edges. And let’s be honest - it’s hard to get people excited about edges.

But that’s exactly the problem.

Because when accessibility becomes a “we’ll get to it later” issue, it never really arrives. It becomes a checkbox. Something we sprinkle on before launch so we can say we tried. But trying isn’t the same as committing. It’s the difference between remembering to add alt text and actually designing with blind users in mind from the start. One is decoration. The other is culture.

And changing culture? That’s the long game. That’s where the repetition comes in.

You repeat yourself not because people are dense, but because habits are stubborn. Because some folks still think accessibility is someone else’s job. Because it’s easy to assume that if a page looks clean, it is accessible. And because the tools - automated scanners, overlays, that one Chrome plugin everyone swears by - give a false sense of completion. (Spoiler: they miss things. Important things.)

What keeps me going isn’t inspiration. It’s a mild irritation, oddly enough. That low-level itch that flares up every time I see a keyboard trap, or an invisible link, or a modal that slams the door shut on assistive tech. It’s knowing we can do better - and wondering why we keep pretending that “good enough” ever was.

And yes, occasionally it is satisfying. When a designer genuinely wants to understand reading order. When a dev asks about semantic HTML without prompting. When someone finally realises why "Click here" is terrible UX. These are small wins, but they matter. They mean the conversation is shifting - slowly, inconsistently, but shifting all the same.

I think the real antidote to accessibility fatigue isn’t motivation. It’s shared responsibility. When the weight is distributed, it gets lighter. When the designer, the copywriter, the tester, the product lead all see accessibility as part of their craft - not an afterthought - it stops being a chore and starts being what it always should’ve been: part of making good stuff for people.

People, after all, aren’t edge cases. They’re the whole point.

Written by Stu Collett – web veteran & recovering perfectionist.
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We spend a lot of time talking about the future of the web - and most of the time, it’s about speed. Faster load times. Faster transactions. Faster ways to squeeze a few more minutes from our overstretched lives. Speed has become the drumbeat behind every new tool, every keynote, every project launch.

Speed equals progress. Right?

Except... I’m not sure that's the future we actually need. Or even really want.

When I think about the web I want my daughter to grow up with, I don't picture her racing through websites that anticipate her every click and decision before she's had time to think. I picture her having time to think. To read. To wander a little. To get lost, in a good way. To feel safe enough to be curious.

Maybe even - and it sounds almost radical to say it out loud - to feel seen as a human being rather than a datapoint.

Because here's the uncomfortable truth: faster often means more extractive. More frantic. Less space for care, for accessibility, for those slower, quieter needs that don't tend to fit into quarterly KPIs. It's not just that we move quickly - it's that we stop noticing who gets left behind.

Somewhere along the way, "progress" became synonymous with shaving milliseconds off page loads and automating human moments out of existence. Signing up. Checking out. Logging in. Logging out. Faster, faster, faster.

But what are we actually rushing towards? And who benefits from that speed? It's not always the users. It’s not always us.

When we optimise everything for velocity, we risk building digital spaces that are technically impressive but emotionally empty. Efficient but joyless. Imposing, even. Spaces that demand our attention without earning it, that push us to react before we've had a chance to feel.

And it’s not sustainable, either. The relentless pursuit of speed feeds bigger, hungrier systems - ones that consume more data, more energy, more of our mental bandwidth. It asks us to be constantly available, constantly adaptable, constantly "on."

The future I want to help build is one where kindness is baked in, not bolted on as a reluctant accessibility statement or a post-hoc ethical review.

Websites and services that are thoughtful as much as they are efficient. Where friction isn’t always seen as a flaw, but sometimes as a deliberate invitation to pause. To reflect. To properly engage.

Not slower for the sake of it - but slower where it matters.

Where a service takes an extra beat to explain itself clearly, rather than railroading you through assumptions. Where content is designed for understanding, not just for SEO. Where the humans behind the technology actually acknowledge the humans using it.

Because technology doesn't have to be a race. It can be a conversation. It can be a craft. It can be a community.

Maybe the real next frontier isn't a faster web at all. Perhaps it's a kinder one.

Written by Stu Collett – web veteran & recovering perfectionist.
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There’s something undeniably seductive about using AI in the workplace. It’s fast, doesn’t take lunch breaks or call in sick with a suspicious-sounding cough. It doesn't grumble about the air con, complain about a bad back or eat smelly lunches. On paper, it's a dream colleague - efficient, scalable, eerily unflappable.

But - and here’s where it gets awkward - the moment we invite machines into decision-making spaces, into hiring, firing, reviewing, surveilling... well, things start to get murky. Kind of ethically fidgety. Some people may even take advantage of that situation.

Let’s start with the basics. AI doesn’t think, at least not in any conscious, sentient way. Or not yet anyway. It learns patterns from data. And where does that data come from? Us. Gloriously flawed, historically biased, frequently contradictory humans. Which means if we’ve got a track record of say, favouring a certain demographic for promotion or undervaluing certain types of labour, the AI - being the dutiful mimic it is - will quietly bake that bias into its decision-making.

The scary part is that it doesn’t consider this yet. It can’t. It does it without even meaning to, because it’s been fed human bias to learn from. It doesn’t have to be malicious to be damaging. Bias is bias.

Then there's the matter of transparency. If an AI recommends restructuring a team, or flags someone as ‘low-performing’, can anyone explain how it reached that conclusion? Or are we nodding, quietly grateful it saved us from a difficult conversation? Using it as an excuse.

The moment we stop caring about the tools we use, we lose not only control, but accountability. "The data proved it" is not an ethical defence. It’s barely a sentence.

Of course, it's not all doom and ambiguity. There are genuinely helpful, humane applications in the workplace. AI can spot burnout patterns before people even realise they’re stretched too thin. It can highlight gender pay gaps, flag dodgy hiring practices, or help neurodivergent staff navigate complex workplace systems. Used responsibly, AI can be useful and dare I say it, kind.

But responsibility is the key word. Who sets the guardrails? Who gets to say what’s fair, what’s just, what’s humane? A well-meaning HR team? A procurement manager choosing between vendors with slick demos and even slicker price tags? The risk isn’t just that we’ll automate bad decisions. It’s that we’ll do so with new found confidence - the efficiency that we forget to question.

But look, no one’s seriously suggesting we go full Luddite. The AI horse has well and truly bolted. But we do need to stay awake. Ask awkward questions and build in pause buttons. Maybe even hire a few philosophers - or at least people who know how to say, “Hang on a second…”

Because at the heart of all this, we’re not really talking about machines. We’re talking about people and about values. About the kind of workplace, and world, we’re shaping. AI might help us get there faster. But we should be very, very sure about where ‘there’ actually is.